Unnatural Issue (51 page)

As soon as Susanne, hidden in the doorway of a crypt, smelled the stench of corruption, she knew her father had not been able to withstand the temptation she had presented and had finally struck. She did not wait to see the horror that was coming; instead she retreated, swiftly but stealthily, out of the graveyard proper. A stretch of waste ground—part of the graveyard that had not been used as yet—provided a clean, uncontaminated space she could use. There, she cast down Robin’s token, and waited.

She didn’t have to wait long. Robin appeared, with at least a dozen lesser Fae.

She started when she saw them and stifled a cry with her hands; to be honest, they almost looked like liches themselves, clothed in tattered gray gowns and shrouded with cobwebby veils.

But she didn’t have time to say a word; Robin’s head came up, and he sniffed the air like a dog, then seized her wrist and pulled her along after him as he went off at a fast trot.

Behind him, the other Fae faded away. She knew why; they had only appeared to reassure her that they had come in the first place. It was all they could do to maintain their forms in the middle of a mortal town like this, and they would have to save their strength for the action to come.

She almost resisted him, almost went back to try to help the others. But that was not part of the plan,
her
plan, and if it was to have any chance of succeeding, she had to follow it exactly.

They moved quickly along the street that led to the graveyard. The street was utterly deserted, the buildings on both sides dark and locked up for the night, and an ice-fog descended out of nowhere, laden with sorrow, despair, and a hint of fear.

She couldn’t help it; she shivered uncontrollably, with fear as much as with cold. They didn’t go far. Robin stopped, suddenly, as the stench of corruption welled up all around them. By now the fog had closed in so thickly that the only thing she could make out was the vague form of a building in front of them.

She knew, then; she could feel it too, feel the Earth itself rejecting this
thing
that walked upon it, this bringer of unlife.

Richard was here, in or near that building, directing his army of the dead against her friends.

Robin held up his hand, and a faint glow came from it, illuminating both their faces in the fog. “Time to go,” he whispered, his eyes, too, glowing, with an unearthly, cold rage.

She nodded.

Steeling herself, she felt her way to the building; ran her hands along it until she came to a door, and opened it.

And the darkness inside billowed up and swallowed her.

“I thought blessed salt would hold them at bay!” Lord Alderscroft didn’t have to shout to be heard; the dead fought in unnerving silence, with only the occasional snap of jaws as one got close enough to the party to try for a bite. And the trolls and goblins weren’t making any noises either. The only sounds were those of weapons on bodies, or the shattering of brittle old bones.

“It does—” said Peter, dodging a troll’s immense club, and countering with a vicious blast of ice-shards at the creature’s face. Alderscroft made the fire encircling them flare up, buying them a little breathing space, but the goblins were not deterred, sending sharp flints at their heads from their slings.

“But we had to sow it on snow,” Peter continued, “Except right around this bench—” A flint gashed his forehead before Maya could deflect it, and he cursed at the pain. “I think some of it blew or was brushed away—”

The mongooses were too fast even for the goblins to catch; they dashed in and out of the horde, severing what was left of the tendons of ankles and knees and getting in bites on the goblins when they could; the liches collapsed but kept coming. Peter knew from past experience that nothing would stop them but having their heads and hands severed from the rest of the body. Alderscroft was doing just that to any of them that got within reach of the sword that had been in his cane, and Garrick was doing likewise, wielding a pole-arm that had decorated the mirror above the bar of the “Owl and Mirror” pub until three days ago. Garrick and Peter Scott each had pole-arms; Scott had been a ship’s captain and was using a boathook with deadly accuracy in grim silence.

“This isn’t going well,” Alderscroft growled, as the simulacrum of Susanne cowered on the bench in their midst. “We’re going to have to break for it in a moment.”

Despite the sweat pouring out of every pore, Peter went cold. The moment they retreated from the bench, the ruse would be exposed. The illusion had only two modes—contemplation and cowering. The illusion would break as soon as they touched the spell-bundle; they couldn’t retreat “with” Susanne, and they did not dare leave the spell bundle, so intimately connected to Susanne, behind.

So one of them would snatch up the bundle, the illusion would break, and Richard Whitestone would know at that moment that Susanne was elsewhere. And only the Good Lord—or perhaps the Devil himself—knew what he would do when that happened.

“Just hold on,” Peter begged them all, and deflected a shower of flints from Maya with a thin sheet of frozen fog. “Give her a little more time.”

But time was precisely what they were rapidly running out of.

The building was cavernous. A barn? A warehouse? It had an air of neglect about it, and was full of dust and the sickly smell of rotting flesh.

There was a dim light in the very middle; “corpse-light” was the name that Susanne would have put to it, the phosphorescence of decay. Her father stood in the middle of this patch of sickly blue-green light, utterly still, utterly alone, eyes closed. Directing his terrible army, she suspected. Perhaps seeing through the dead eyes of his slaves.

But as she ventured into the enormous room, her footfalls alerted him, and his eyes flew open. “Who’s there?” he demanded, his voice harsh, as if he had not used it much for weeks or even months.

It sent chills down her back, and she wanted nothing more than to turn and run. This was insane. Even with the help of Robin’s Fae. But she put one foot in front of the other and slowly made her way toward him.

“It’s me,” she croaked. “Susanne.”
Your daughter,
she had meant to add, but she couldn’t force herself to speak the words. “You have to stop this. You have to stop it now. It’s wrong! How can you, an Earth Master, possibly
do
something like this? Can’t you feel how the very Earth revolts against what you are doing?”

She had to give Robin the chance to get his Fae into place. He needed time; they needed her distraction to come close, and they needed time to put on their illusions. It was just a good thing that this was a wooden building, so there was no iron frame to cause them pain, but there were still thousands of Cold Iron nails holding it together, weakening them.

She felt him really
looking
at her for the first time. “So . . . you did inherit some of the magic.”

She felt tears, unfeigned tears, running down her face as she approached him. What had he done to Charles? Doctor Maya was of the opinion now that he had something to do with Charles’ loss of memory. How many unwilling spirits had he bound back into their festering corpses? “You have to stop this. Please, this is wrong. You’re hurting people, good people. I can’t let you do that.”

“And what do you intend to do about it, girl?” His voice was strange, harsh, as if he hadn’t actually used it in a very long time. “Fight me?” His lips curled back in a sneer. “Just because you know
about
magic, you aren’t a Huntsman, girl. You aren’t even trained—who was there to train you? You are no match for
me
!”

“No!” she interrupted him desperately, as out of the corner of her eye she sensed movement. “No! I’m not going to let innocent people suffer when—I’m going to come back to you, Father.” Oh, how the words tasted like spoiled meat on her tongue. Yet she had no choice. She had to tell him what he wanted most to hear. “I’ll come with you now, I’ll do whatever you like! Just promise me that you’ll stop all this, that you’ll leave the Kerridges alone!”

He stared at her, dumbfounded. He certainly had not expected to hear her say
that.
But he recovered quickly. Knowing how he thought, now, she was pretty sure she could guess what was running through his mind.
I’m a simple-minded, simple girl, no more clever than the kitchen maids. I don’t
know
what he is, not really. I have a little magic, perhaps, but not enough to threaten him.

She spoke quickly, playing into that. “I was afeared, Father,” she said, putting on her thickest accent. “I was afeared tha’d send me t’school, and all the girls there ’ould make mock of me.” She was so terrified now that it was no effort at all to let her eyes overflow with tears and her limbs tremble. “I never could be like them! The clothes tha’ got for me, they was like to strangle me . . . the lessons tha’ set me, they made my head spin! I jest wanted everything t’ be same again! So I run. And when tha’ sent tha’ monsters, I run again! Kerridges, they couldna see the back of me fast enough, an’ put me on boat. But I couldna stay, I hated it, it were all strange and foreignlike, I couldna understand anyone, the food wasna right, the soldiers sent me home an’ I was glad to go, an’ all I want is for everything to go back to how it was!”

The last words ended in a sob. She buried her face in her hands, but she kept her fingers spread a little so she could see his face. His expression was changing, from anger, through surprise, to a smug satisfaction. She had done it. She had convinced him. And now—

“My dear child,” he said, wheedlingly. “I thought the Kerridges had managed to turn you against me. That was why I attacked them! I thought they were keeping you, my own daughter, my own flesh and blood, from me! I’m not like them; I don’t have an army of servants. I tried to get you back using the only army I could—and what did it matter? The dead are dead and don’t care what happens to them anymore.”

Hurry, Robin, hurry!
she thought, as he edged forward, one hand crooked and twitching, ready to seize her the moment he got within reach. Crying into her hands, she backed up a step for every one that he took forward. She had to get him out of that circle—she knew it was there, it was invisible, but she could
feel
it. She had to get him out of his protections, or the Fae could do nothing.

At any moment she expected him to realize what she was doing and stop moving. But he didn’t. He kept his eyes fixed on her, and his expression of avid glee made her blood run cold.

And then he stepped over the circle. Then got three feet past it.

“Richard!”
The voice that came out of the darkness behind him made him start. And a woman dressed in the remains of what looked like a wedding dress appeared in midair, glowing faintly with her own light. Susanne knew who she was, of course, but it was still startling to see her own face reflected in those pale features.

“Richard, what are you doing? How could you do this to our daughter, to my baby?”
She had told Robin what she wanted them to say, and Richard Whitestone reacted exactly as she had thought he would.

“I’m doing this for
you,
Rebecca!” he shouted, his face pale and his brow beading with sweat, eyes wide and wild. “I’m doing this for
us!
I’m going to bring you back, we can be together again! It will only take one little ritual and—”

“Murderer!”
the Fae shrilled in horror.
“You would murder my child! How could you? Don’t lie, Richard, this is murder! You would slay her just as you slaughtered the servants,
our
servants, to fulfill your foul needs!”

Susanne was suddenly struck dumb. This wasn’t anything she had told the Fae to say—

But the guilty expression on Richard Whitestone’s face told her that it was nothing less than the truth. He
had
murdered the others, her friends, her protectors—the only real family she had ever had.

Agatha. Old Mary. Nigel and Mathew. Prudence and Patience. People who had never done her, never done her
father,
anything but good. People who had comforted her, taught her, cared for her.