Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels) (46 page)

I looked over my shoulder, locating Rory by the tiny silver dots of his eyes. The sight of it was eerie but reassuring. ‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Hannah,’ he said.

‘What?’ I was snappy with nerves.

I felt his fingertips graze my arm, then his hand closed around it. Rory pulled me carefully against him in the darkness, and he took an involuntary breath.

‘What?’ I said again, a lot less snappily.

In the silence I found his tangled grubby hair with my fingers, then ran my hands down across his ears and found his cheekbones. His face felt thinner. I hadn’t noticed that, just looking
at him in the daylight, but I could feel the difference in the darkness. It felt like an older face. Less like a boy, more like a man.

His hand slipped behind my neck and he laced his fingers through my roughly chopped hair. I was glad Eili had cut it, since there was less of it to be a greasy mess: maybe pitch darkness had its
advantages. We were both filthy and sweaty and pretty smelly but he tasted the same, I decided, finding his mouth first with my fingers and then with my own mouth. What would be nice now would be
just to melt into him, climb inside his head and body altogether and be protected until Seth came back with the cavalry.

It wasn’t going to happen. I could feel the solid thump of his heart against my ribcage and the echoing banging of my own.

No,
really
, we couldn’t just stand here. Nice as it would be.

Sighing, I ran my hands down his chest and stomach and shoved him reluctantly away. The manoeuvre provoked a satisfying squeak.

‘What?’ I said it yet again, clearing my own throat. Heat rushed into my skin.

‘Nothing. That’s fine.’ His lower lip grazed my upper lip in the darkness, and our noses bumped briefly. ‘Just, I feel better now.’

That’s nice, I thought, because I think I’m going to have a frigging heart attack, but okay, so long as you feel better…

Rory gave a nervous laugh, and I realised he’d heard me. If I could have seen his shin I might have kicked it. Instead, tentatively, I felt my way forward, one hand on the damp stone wall
to make sure I was going in the right direction. For a moment I thought I’d got it wrong anyway, that I’d turned a hundred and eighty degrees and had my hand on the wrong wall, but just
as I felt the stirrings of panic, the ground dipped beneath my feet. Shortening my steps, I felt my feet touch water. I walked on till I was ankle deep, and took a shocked breath.

Oh.
Oh
. The cold clamped around my ankles as if it was trying to cut off my feet. I considered the imminent prospect of immersing my entire body in it, and I whimpered.

‘What is it?’ hissed Rory.

‘Cold. I’ll just warn you.’ I started to breathe the way I’d heard Seth do it, only I couldn’t. The stale air shuddered in and out of my lungs as I waded deeper, my
fingertips dragging the wall and then the ceiling as it sloped down to meet me. My next step took me up to my thighs, the next to my waist, and I knew if the slope was constant the next would take
me out of my depth.

I knew if I waited and thought about it any more I wasn’t going to do this. I took a final scared gasp and submerged.

I nearly pushed myself straight back out. The icy water tightened around my chest like steel bands, already trying to force the air out of me. A couple of bubbles escaped from my lips and I
doubled over and kicked down, forcing myself head first into the flooded tunnel. My scalp scraped the rock ceiling and I pushed myself pointlessly down and away from it. For a moment I flailed
there, unable to move, then my frozen brain remembered what Seth had said.
Pull yourself along against the wall.
I reached out numb fingertips and began to lever myself along, forgetting
about kicking.

I was aware that the passage was narrowing, aware that when I had first reached for the wall I could barely touch it with both hands. Now my elbows had to stay awkwardly bent; I couldn’t
stretch my arms at all.

A terrible idea struck me. I might bump into Seth’s body, stuck like a cork in an impossibly narrow bottleneck. There might have been a rockfall. Something could have got stuck in the
tunnel ages ago and died: an animal, a fish, a
monster
… Anything could have happened. I blinked hard, but the view didn’t change.

Another couple of bubbles leaked out with my tiny cry of panic. I began to flail my limbs, kicking violently, but I only kicked solid rock, painfully hard.

Behind me I was vaguely aware of Rory in the tunnel, but I couldn’t See him clearly for the panic in my head, my skull and brain tight and shrunken with cold. It occurred to me that if I
stopped swimming Rory would die too, and that Seth would kill me, but that didn’t make a lot of sense.

My lungs protested desperately, squeezed by a giant fist. They didn’t want the air inside them that was about to make them explode. They wanted a fresh lungful, they wanted me to breathe
out and then breathe in again. I blew out a longer stream of bubbles, felt them tickle my face, and they were coming out of my nose now too. In a way it was bliss. Any second now I’d breathe
out and then I could suck in a whole lungful of…

Fingers closed hard around my wrist and I was tugged forward through the blackness. A last few agonising seconds, and then I was yanked clear of the water, dumped on dry land, and I hauled in a
lungful of stale air with a high-pitched wheeze.

It tasted so good. Best air I’d ever breathed. Seth let go of me but before he had time to plunge back into the water the surface of it broke, and another body erupted and tumbled forward
onto dry land.

‘You two took your time,’ said Seth, relief in his voice. ‘What was the last thing I told you, Hannah?’

‘D-d-don’t panic,’ I gritted through chattering teeth.

‘Whoa, yes,’ came Rory’s voice. He was panting. ‘Glad I gave you a head start, there, Hannah. I was nearly bumping into your heels at one point.’

‘Thanks a million.’ I was shivering violently and I didn’t need my nose rubbed in my panic. I didn’t need the humiliation, not when I was already freezing to death.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Seth kindly, rubbing my arms.

‘I am.’ My teeth chattered. ‘Stop looking in–’

I’d been about to say
Stop looking in my head
, but I realised in time it would be a pretty tactless thing to say when he couldn’t look in Rory’s. Glancing up, I saw
the pinprick lights of his eyes, and instead I thought, ~
Sorry.

‘It’s okay,’ he said.

‘Dad,’ said Rory. ‘The Veil starts to thicken here. We’re getting nearer the dun.’

‘Okay.’ Seth breathed hard. ‘Tear it, Laochan. Blocks up.’

It was reassuring to know we were getting somewhere. The end was, if not in sight, then at least within reach, and being back on the dangerous side gave all of us a renewed sense of urgency.
Anyway, it was better to be moving. Our clothes were soaking now and putting on speed kept away the worst of the biting cold.

I tried to walk too fast, almost breaking into a jog in an effort to get warm, and several times I stumbled and fell. It was happening to the others too, though, and at one point even Seth
sprawled on his face with a grunt of pain. When I fumbled to grab him and help him stagger to his feet, I felt the shuddering tremors of cold going through his body. He’d lost a lot of blood,
of course, and he couldn’t run forever on adrenalin and bloody-mindedness.

‘Are you okay?’ It felt funny having to ask him out loud, and I realised I was growing used to having my mind read. I almost resented the effort of speaking, and I did not like the
echo my voice made in the cavern.

‘Finn’s going to kill me when she sees the state of you,’ I added as Seth paused to catch his breath and recover his balance.

‘Don’t worry.’ Seth’s voice shivered through gritted teeth. ‘She won’t be looking too great herself.’ Shaking himself audibly, he walked on.

That’s probably true, I thought, guilty at forgetting. I was still picturing what must have happened between Finn and Eili and the Wolf, my imagination going into skidding overdrive in the
dark, when I collided with Seth. He’d come to an abrupt halt. Rory in turn banged into me. His hand fumbled for mine in the darkness, and squeezed it reassuringly.

‘This is it,’ came Seth’s voice. ‘Now just hang on.’

N
o
,
I thought,
I’m not hanging on any more.
Elbowing the obstruction that was Seth out of the way, I barged forward. Some instinct made me turn my face
aside at the last instant, or I’d have broken my nose. It was my cheek that connected with solid stone, and my knuckles, and one knee. I knew I’d drawn blood in all those places but I
no longer cared. All I cared about was finding the gap.

There wasn’t one. My fingers scratched at the blank stone, feeling above my head and out to the side and down to where the wall met the floor, but there wasn’t so much as a
crack.

‘IT’S BLOCKED!’ I screamed.

‘Shut up,’ said Seth quietly. ‘I said hang on.’ His fingertips knocked into my shoulder, then travelled down my arm till they found the hand Rory wasn’t holding,
and wound tightly into my fingers. ‘Don’t lose it, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Not now. Rory?’

‘I’m here, Dad.’

It suddenly occurred to me why this blackness was nothing to them. It didn’t panic them because it was all external darkness, and the darkness inside was a lot worse. This was what it was
like in their minds. Blackness, blindness, where there should have been constant light and an unbreakable connection. It seemed such an unspeakably evil thing to have done to them. I felt an awful
pity, and anger. I squeezed Seth’s fingers with one hand and Rory’s with the other.

‘Is there a way through?’ I asked more calmly.

‘There was thirty years ago.’ Seth released my hand.

‘Oh.’ I swore.

‘Language,’ said Seth absently, but he was concentrating too hard on something to say any more. ‘Got it,’ he whispered at last, just as I was beginning to think we would
at least be united in our unpleasant deaths.

‘Got what?’ I asked sceptically.

His eyelight gleamed. ‘Keep blocking. Both of you. Rory, you’re sure the hole in the Veil will stay open?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Rory’s eyes sparked in the darkness. ‘Long enough, anyway.’

Seth began to laugh. ‘You still know what I’m thinking, Laochan. Despite Kate. Now, Hannah.’

‘What?’

‘You want out of this tunnel? Just you walk with me.’

Sulaire MacTorc was getting lonely in his job. On a normal day there were at least three cooks working at any one time. He liked his work and he liked the company, but these
were not normal times. Not only was there no-one spare to work with, they all had to take their turn on the ramparts, fighting back the unremitting assaults. One of the cooks was already dead with
a dagger in his throat. It wasn’t reassuring. It was bloody sad, since he’d been a good friend, but they’d all be joining him soon.

At least there was plenty of food. Bit unusual, that, for a siege, but the full-mortal Cuilean had taken the decision to let them eat well. That was nice, but everyone knew what it meant in
reality. It meant they weren’t going to last long enough to starve.

He was a good man, Cuilean, humane and brave, and at least he was trying to keep their spirits high. Dolefully Sulaire stared at the side of bacon he was to turn into breakfast for the next
shift. Plenty eggs, too. On the whole he’d rather be using his ingenuity with starvation rations, if it meant they had a cat’s chance in hell, but they didn’t. Cuilean knew it,
the other captains knew it, they all knew it. They were going to die, that much was obvious, and anyone left alive beyond the battle was going to die horribly when Kate broke through, but it was
nice to eat well in the meantime. Breakfast was unlikely to make things brighter, but he’d get on with it anyway. It wasn’t just his job, it was his calling.

Sulaire wondered what had happened to Murlainn and his gorgeous wee boy. Well, not wee any more; it was just that it seemed like yesterday when Rory Bhan had been hanging around the kitchens
sweet-talking Sulaire into giving him chocolate. Sulaire hoped they were okay, though it seemed unlikely. They were well out of this, anyway. He hoped they hadn’t come to the same end as
Murlainn’s brother, the man Sulaire had worshipped, the man he would have happily died for and over whose death he had wept for days. He hoped they hadn’t come to the same end as his
father Torc, who had died with Cù Chaorach, and whose death had quite simply broken his heart.

He had just reached for a boning knife when he heard a low grinding sound, and he froze.

This was it, was it? His time had finally come.

They were under strict orders from the full-mortal Cuilean to block fully all the time, no exceptions. Kate NicNiven’s abilities had taken a quantum leap over the last decade, he’d
told them, sucking the strength out of defeated fighters like the witch she was. And Eili MacNeil had had Kate in her head for months without knowing it; Kate’s telepathy was powerful and
extreme and the witch was more than willing to misuse it. They didn’t know all she was capable of but
don’t let her in your head.

It terrified Sulaire, and he had obeyed Cuilean every minute of every day, but for the first time the young cook was seriously tempted to drop his block. He wanted to know what was behind him
– probably an entire division of Kate’s troops breaking in through a wall – and he’d rather know without having to look. All the same, he was too afraid of Cuilean’s
reaction to disobey siege orders. Instead he clenched his teeth to stop them chattering, and reached for a second knife. And then, slowly, he turned.

O
h. My. Dear. Gods
, thought Sulaire.

Clearly it was some trick of Kate’s. How else would the larder shelving be grinding slowly out from the wall? For a moment Sulaire shut his eyes, wondering why his father had backed the
wrong horse at such clearly impossible odds. Then he remembered how much Torc had hated Kate and her gratuitous cruelty, and he opened his eyes again and set his jaw. Since there was no question he
was going to die, there was no point dying like a coward.