The Borderkind (24 page)

She left unspoken the fact that if they did not reach Vienna soon, the plan would have to wait until the following night, and that would be another entire day’s delay before they could reach Collette.

Anger flared upon Oliver’s face. The rental agent was a big man, broad across the shoulders, with enormous hands, but when Oliver slammed his hand on the counter the man backed away instantly.

“Why?” Oliver shouted.

The man began to curse at him in German, throwing up his hands. Spittle flew from his mouth and his red face turned purple. Oliver swore, swept up his I.D. and credit card, then reached over to snatch a ring of keys from the wall, the heavy duffel bag banging the front of the counter as it swung forward.

The man tried to grab him but Oliver was too quick.

“Hurry!” Kitsune called.

They ran out of the little building. In the low thrum of city noises there were no sirens, but the lights had grown brighter. Down the darkened street, slicked with freezing rain, the police car was coming.

“How do we—” she began.

Oliver held up the keys, touched a button, and one of the cars chirped, its taillights flashing. They ran to it. The blue lights swept closer.

“Just get in and get down,” Oliver said.

The car was in the second row, third in from the end. Oliver pushed the duffel in and they tumbled inside, shutting the doors in the very same moment that the police car pulled into the car rental lot. They sat in the darkness, both of them breathing hard, as the police car stopped right in front of the little building.

A single policeman climbed out, glanced around once, and walked to the door. He stared at the broken glass and then entered.

Oliver put the keys in the ignition.

“Wait,” Kitsune said.

She opened the door, cursing the momentary flash of the dome light, and shut it quickly behind her. Then she was moving across the lot with an inhuman swiftness, racing along on fox feet. Inside, the car rental agent was shouting at the police officer in guttural German, gesturing wildly to the cars in the parking lot. The policeman snapped, pointing at the man, not pleased at all with being spoken to in such fashion. He held up a hand, wanting to make sure the rental agent stayed inside.

Cautiously, the police officer opened the door again, shoes crunching shattered glass.

By the time he stepped out of the little building, Kitsune had slashed both of his rear tires with unnaturally sharp claws. Unaware, he began to walk toward the darkened rental cars, brandishing a flashlight.

The fox dashed across the lot.

From fox to woman, she stood in a crouch and opened the car door. The dome light went on again.

The cop saw the light and started to shout.

“Drive!” Kitsune cried.

The engine roared as Oliver turned the key, and she practically fell into the car as he put it in gear and tore out of the parking space. The policeman shouted after them even as he ran back toward his car.

Seconds later they were out onto the street, racing into the darkness and grime of an unknown Austrian town, headed for Vienna in a stolen car.

The policeman would not be able to give chase. There would be others, Kitsune knew, but if they could get out of this little industrial town without being caught, she felt sure they would reach Vienna.

“What just happened?” Oliver said, and she was sure the question was directed more to himself than to her, so she did not respond. “Why are they after me?”

Kitsune said nothing, only watched the troubled expression on his pale features as oncoming headlights washed over them. She reached out and put a comforting hand upon his thigh. They drove in silence, the echo of unanswered questions drowning out anything else they might have wished to say to one another.

CHAPTER
13

T
he Vittora no longer spoke, not even nonsense words. Even the insinuating tone of its quotes from her favorite films had ceased. Collette sat propped against the grating sand wall of her strange cell, turned to one side, legs drawn up beneath her. She had made herself very small, there in that rounded prison. The moon and starlight that came through the high, arched windows provided no comfort. As though she lay in her bed at home and could burrow underneath the bedclothes for protection and privacy, she huddled there, lost in thought.

Her mind wandered, lulled and lured by the voice of the Vittora. It no longer spoke to her, but that did not mean it was silent. Rather, its voice had become a ceaseless song, a high, childlike, singsong melody that segued from “Over the Rainbow” to “As Time Goes By” to “In Your Eyes” and on through others before starting all over again. This perversion of the music from her favorite films had begun to tear down her passion for those cherished memories. The incessant humming was quickly becoming the soundtrack for her madness.

The Vittora, she’d been told, comprised all her hope. Its separation from her flesh was harbinger to her doom. Yet as she drew her limbs even more tightly to herself, it occurred to her that the Vittora might be the place she was storing the fear and hysteria that she ought to have been feeling.

In that moonlit pit, she sat in her filthy pajamas with sand in every conceivable crevice, the stale smell of her own body in her nose, and the stubble of her unshaven legs prickly under the cotton. The Vittora was a tiny sphere of light, no larger now than a baseball—a golden glow that flickered and swayed on the other side of the chamber as though taunting her.

But as much as she hated the thing and wanted to snuff it out completely, Collette felt certain that as long as the Vittora remained, she would not succumb entirely to terror. As long as the Vittora remained, she could think.

A vast abyss seemed to open up beneath her. Collette felt the pull of it, as though she teetered on the edge and would tumble into it any moment.

“Up,” she whispered.

With that single syllable, she placed one hand on the wall and practically leaped to her feet. The Vittora hummed the tune for the Lollipop Guild and Collette laughed under her breath. Images of the Munchkins of Oz blossomed in her mind but were quickly replaced by small children, mutilated by the Sandman.

“Fucker.” Her voice was a dry rasp. It seemed she had not had anything to eat or drink for a while, and presumed that her captor was punishing her for spying on him or trying to escape, or both.

The question is how,
she thought.
How the hell did you do that?

The Vittora sang softly, as though to itself. Collette turned her back on it, half wishing the thing would simply disappear despite what that might mean. She stared at the gently curved wall, at the glitter of small bits of quartz or other reflective mineral in the sand.

Brow furrowed, she reached out and pressed the tips of her fingers against the wall. Nothing. It was entirely unyielding. Adding pressure, she tried to dig her fingers in, staring at the sand, at her ragged fingernails. Gritting her teeth, she put her weight into it, trying to drive her nails in. A little dart of pain shot up her ring finger and she hissed and pulled away, sucking on that finger, wondering if she had torn the nail.

Where was the door?

With only her palm, she brushed against the hard, abrasive surface of the sand wall, but it was truly like cement. She had been around and around her cell, probing for another soft place like the one she had discovered before, and found nothing.

Home. Collette had felt it, sensed it, tasted and smelled it. That bedroom, where the child had been horribly murdered, existed back in her own world. The place she was supposed to be. The Sandman could pass back and forth between the two worlds.

“So did he let me through, or did I dig my own way?” she whispered to the wall, to the night.

The Vittora paused and for a moment she thought it would give one of its nonsense replies, but then it began humming again, a shrill melody that she recognized from childhood, from some Disney film or other, though she could not place it precisely.

She ignored it.

Focused on the wall, she tried again to press her fingers into the sand, working the tips against the wall. Grimly determined, she slid her fingers across the hard surface, testing again and again. Useless. The wall was only a wall and her fingers could not penetrate.

It had to have been the Sandman, making the sand malleable, giving her the chance to follow. The creature had allowed her to dig away at soft sand and find that door and see what she had seen.

But then, why was he so furious?

The question lingered. She remembered quite well the way it felt to plunge her fingers into the yielding sand and to excavate that door that led out of her prison. It had certainly
felt
as though she was doing it herself.

Collette took a long, shuddering, exhausted breath and pressed her forehead against the wall. The sand scraped her skin, but in frustration she pressed harder and began to slide her forehead to the left, welcoming the sting, the million little shards of pain. She hissed in through her teeth, but then she just stood like that, head leaning on the wall, hands pressed against it on either side of her. The Vittora hummed high and shrill, and now she knew the song.

“I’ve got no strings…to hold me down,” she sang along, voice quaking.

With a shout, she struck the wall. Pain jammed her knuckles.

Something shifted elsewhere in the cell. Rustled. Collette spun and glanced around. The Vittora had stopped its childlike humming and had shrunk to a mere pinprick of illumination. In the light of the moon, she stared around at the haunting gloom of the rounded cell and saw that she was indeed still alone.

The sound came again. A shifting rustle, something familiar about it.

And then she knew:
feathers
.

Collette craned her neck back and looked up. One of the skeletal creatures she had seen before was crouched in an arched window, green-feathered wings black in the moonlight. Its enormous tangle of antlers hung heavy upon its head. She blinked a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust, and she could barely make out the gleam of its eyes.

“What do you want?” she demanded, hating the tinny, frantic sound of her voice.

The Hunter only perched there, limbs jutting at harsh angles. After a moment it gave a birdlike cock of its head and seemed to study her even more closely. A shiver went through Collette. Its antlers threw moonlight shadows down upon the floor of the cell like the twisted branches of some looming tree outside her bedroom one stormy night.

But there was no storm here. No sound, save a barely audible wind and the rustle of its wings as the Hunter shifted its weight again.

“Stop…why are you just staring at me like that? What do you
want
?”

It spread its wings and rose, legs tensed, about to take flight.

“No, wait!” she cried. “Please!”

The Hunter paused, regarding her once more. Curiously, it cocked its head again and wrapped its wings around itself like a cloak.

“I know…I know you won’t help me,” she said. No, she wasn’t that much of a fool. This thing wanted to kill her, maybe even eat her, if it was into that. Only the fact that the Sandman wanted her for bait kept the thing from dropping down on her right now.

“But, look, can you just tell me why?”

Silhouetted in the arched window, antlers black streaks across the moon, it lowered into a crouch again. She thought it might actually come down to join her in the pit then, but it remained where it was.

“Why?” the thing repeated, its voice harsh and stilted, as though its mouth was unused to forming words.

In despair, she nodded. “Just…why? Why do you want Oliver dead? Why me? Why…damn it, why us? It’s all riddles and innuendo, and if I’m going to die and my brother is going to die, I’d really like to know why.”

The thing sat for so long staring at her that she was sure she would get no answer. It bent its head and scraped its antlers against the arched window frame, slowly, as if in thought.

Just as she was about to act, to plead, or to scream in frustration, the Hunter spoke.

“You will die because you were never meant to live,” it said in that stilted voice. “You will die because if you are allowed to continue, neither of our worlds will ever be the same. The Bascombes. Creatures of disaster.”

Collette could manage only shallow breaths. She stared at the thing. “Creatures of…what are you talking about? We’ve never done anything to hurt anyone! We’re just…we’re just people.
Boring
people, for Christ’s sake!”

And then she couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Please! Oh, God, please just get me out of here! We’ll go away. Oliver and I, we’ll just disappear, change our names, whatever. Nobody in this place will even know we’re still alive. Just let me out, please! Please!”

Even as the words left her lips she hated herself for them, hated the weakness in her. But desperation was all that she had left.

The Hunter spread his wings again. She thought he would fly away for sure now, but a tiny spark of hope remained and she wondered if instead he would fly down into the chamber and pluck her from her prison. It was a foolish hope, she knew, but could not help nurturing it just for a moment.

When he pulled his wings in again, pinioning them against his back, she saw the gray-cloaked reaper behind him.

The Sandman had come, and even the Hunter seemed unaware.

Swift hands reached up, grabbed hold of the Hunter’s antlers, and twisted. Bones snapped and flesh tore wetly as the Sandman ripped the Hunter’s head from his shoulders.

The thing tumbled into the pit with her, wings fluttering as it struck the sand and twitched, wings attempting to move though the body had no head. It shifted toward her several inches and a spurt of blood jetted from the ragged stump where its head had been.

Collette was frozen to the spot, but even had she been able to flee, there was nowhere for her to go.

The Sandman stepped away from the window’s edge and
spilled
down into the chamber, flowing in a careful avalanche along the wall and then rising up across the cell from her. He held the Hunter’s head in his right hand, antlers clutched in his fist.

“I told them; I tell them all,” he said, “we do not speak to the prey.”

The head fell from his grasp and the sand swallowed it up hungrily, as if it had never been. Then the sand began to slip around the corpse as well. Soon the Hunter would be a memory, a fossil buried deep, and Collette wondered what else had been swallowed up by the sands of this place, this prison.

Then a strange sound reached her—a rasping, grinding noise—and abruptly she realized it was the terrified sound of her own breath. Collette shook all over, heart racing as it had when she had woken from night terrors as a child. But there was no waking from this.

“Please,” she said at last, hating the word more than ever, despising this creature, whom she knew had no understanding of mercy.

The Sandman seemed to fly or flow the short distance between them. His long spindly fingers wrapped around her head, a terrible vise that made her skull feel as though it would pop. She opened her mouth, and the scream that tore from her throat felt like the last vestige of her hope departing. But she lived. She reached up to batter at his arms and his face.

Beneath his hood, he stared at her with those dreadful lemon eyes.

The Sandman drew her close. Collette shrieked her throat raw, fighting him, clawing at him, but he pulled her inexorably toward him. Lemon eyes wide, locking her gaze with his own, he drew her near until their faces were only inches apart.

His lips parted. A pink-brown tongue snaked out. He held her head so tightly, fingers pulling her skin taut, that she could not close her eyes. He ran a tongue like sand across her right eyeball.

Piercing screams filled the chamber. She felt him let her go, felt herself fall to the ground, contorted in a frenzy of revulsion and pain, one hand over her eye.

Darkness claimed her. Blessed unconsciousness, her only escape from the Sandman, from her terror and pain.

And then, unconscious, the nightmares began.

Julianna felt certain she could not walk another step. Yet each time this certainty rose in her mind, Kara would insist they had only a short way to go and she would find enough strength to make it around the next turn or over the next rise. The little girl kept both Julianna and Halliwell going with this persistence and false hope, and yet it seemed like there might be more to it than that. The girl had inhuman endurance, which was not too much of a surprise; Julianna was sure she was no ordinary little girl. But Kara seemed to be able to lend it, at least a little bit, to them, and for that, Julianna was grateful.

“Really. Truly. I can’t keep going. We have to camp for the night. I need to rest, to eat something,” Julianna said.

Halliwell staggered along beside her as though he had just dragged himself from his grave, or was stumbling toward it.

Kara flashed her bright smile and pirouetted in front of them, a sweet, beautiful Pied Piper, luring them along. “You must trust me. It is just over the next rise. If your Oliver is still alive, he will have stopped here. They may have cut his head off already, but he’ll have come to see the king.”

“Just over the next rise?” Julianna asked dubiously.

Halliwell grunted derisively.

“Yes,” Kara insisted, making a face. “Don’t you believe me?”

Julianna laughed softly. “Not a bit. I know you are doing your best to help us, sweetie, but I’m telling you now that if I can’t see the castle from the top of this hill, we’re done. We’re stopping to rest, and sleeping till dawn.”

Kara sighed. “As you wish.”

The night was warm but the breeze was cool, and as exhausted as she was, Julianna shivered with each gentle gust. She wanted a sweatshirt. She wanted a soft bed and a pot of coffee and her TV remote control. Her stomach grumbled and she realized she also wanted cinnamon danish. Nothing else, at that moment. Not a steak or a piece of swordfish; not ravioli or sugary breakfast cereal.