He grabbed hold of her arms, and she saw a flash of metal between two fingers on his left hand.
“In here,” he told her.
He pulled open the door to a single washroom and pushed her. On reflex, Catherine’s hands shot out and grabbed both sides of the doorframe, preventing him from thrusting her inside.
In the mirror she could see that his right hand was coming toward her. She understood the motion: he was going to hit her elbow and make her arm collapse. Catherine kicked her left foot backward. Her high heel sank into his shoe with deadly accuracy, which was, she thought, very lucky, considering how dizzy she felt.
With a gasp of pain, he released her, and Catherine turned, striking at his throat. He dodged the blow, lowered his head, and like a mad bull butted her stomach and forced her into the washroom. Catherine fell backward, hitting the floor.
He was in the room with her, locking the door. The light inside was slightly brighter, and she now saw that he wore what looked like plastic rings over two fingers on his left hand. Those two rings were joined, and at the point of connection was a small needle.
“You—you drugged me!” she said. Only now did she grasp how strangely she’d been acting. She’d let him lead her all the way across the club, let him steer her into seclusion.
He was on her then, straddling her on the floor, his knees holding down her arms.
“Where the hell is it?” he demanded.
She looked up at him through half-closed eyes. Some of the paint was rubbing off his face, but she still didn’t recognize him.
“What?” she asked.
He slapped her. Catherine felt the pain distantly as her head cracked back against the floor. How many times had she felt the needle’s prick? At least three. What sort of drug was it? Something strong. She was close to passing out. Would Mariko be looking for her?
“Where is the athame? You took what was mine. It was promised to me.”
He raised his hand to hit her again, but held it back, letting her answer.
She tried to make her mind work. This man—or boy, it was hard to tell—was a Seeker, of course. She should have spotted that right away, but his motions had been camouflaged by all the dancers around him. And he wasn’t someone she knew.
“Someone promised you…my family’s athame?” she asked slowly, her words slurring. “Who would do that?”
“You know who.”
She didn’t know. Had Seekers been trading stolen athames with each other?
“It was you…on Mont Saint-Michel?” she asked weakly, recognizing him at last.
“Where is it being kept?” he demanded.
“Where…what?”
He shook her, as though that would help her think. Instead the washroom reeled.
“You’re attacking me,” she said, her own words stupid in her ears.
“Nothing gets by you, does it?” Her eyes were out of alignment with each other, so there appeared to be two of him above her, each ready to strike. “Emile was just as slow,” he said, “and things ended just as badly for him.”
“You…Emile? What happened to Emile?”
He was smiling down at her—two of him were smiling down at her. Her eyes latched on to one item in the room. A glass. It was sitting on the edge of the sink, bobbing in and out of her sight line as he shook her. Someone had brought a glass into the washroom and left it here. Dark lipstick along the rim, dregs of something bright green at the bottom.
Her foot. That was her foot down there, wasn’t it? Near the pedestal of the sink.
“My brothers and I will not be bait for someone else,” he hissed into her face. “Our family isn’t going to go away. One of my brothers was in London today.”
What did that mean? Was he threatening her family? Catherine tried to think. She’d have to let him hit her again. And she’d have to move quickly. Can I move quickly? she wondered.
She worked her lips as though she would answer, then she spit at him.
Kick! Catherine told herself.
He slapped her hard. And she kicked.
Her foot connected with the sink, she twisted her legs to one side, and a moment later she felt the painful thud and wet splash of the glass landing on her ankle bone.
“Where did your family put the athame?” he demanded, shaking her again.
Catherine was writhing beneath him. She managed to roll the glass off her leg and toward her left hand.
“I’ll report you…to the Dreads,” she whispered. “It’s my family’s rightful athame. They will punish you.”
“Will they?”
He smiled in a way that reminded her of her parents and their pity. He didn’t fear her going to the Dreads. Why not? she wondered. He should fear them. Even if the Middle Dread is a terrible judge, the Young Dread will have to listen. This person is breaking Seeker laws.
“The athame’s mine…” she said. “I’m keeping it…”
Her arm was still pinned under his knee, but her fingers were around the wet sticky glass. She felt along its surface, turning the glass so she was gripping it by its heavy base. I’m drugged, she thought. He’s relying on that.
“No,” he told her. He leaned close, and as he did, his knee lifted off her arm. “I’m going to kill you and keep it.”
Catherine whispered, “I was going to say the same thing to you.”
She hit the glass sharply against the floor, then slashed at him with what remained—several long shards attached to a thick glass base. She caught him across the neck, and Catherine could feel the shards going deep into his throat and breaking off.
He cried out, his hands grabbing her hair, pulling it wildly as blood pulsed out of his neck. He was screeching, his air drawn in through the wound at his throat. She still saw two of him as he tumbled forward.
Catherine managed to roll out from beneath him, sliding in his blood. Her own fingers were bleeding around the broken glass, but she continued to grip it tightly as she staggered to her feet. Her right hand scrambled for the lock on the door, but her fingers were wet and slipped off the lever.
The door burst open anyway.
Mariko was standing there, a kitchen knife clutched in her hand, a large security guard with a key standing next to her.
Mariko’s eyes swept over Catherine, her pale dress soaked in blood, the washroom behind her.
Mariko took her arm and pulled her away as the guard stared, openmouthed, at the mess within. She bundled Catherine out of the club, and as they left, she said quietly, “Life with you has not been boring, Cat-chan.”
—
Catherine had sobered up by the time she stood, fully clothed, in the shower of Mariko’s pool house, as her friend sprayed her off. Despite the warmth of the shower, Catherine was shaking. The water ran in pink rivulets, brightened by the occasional flake of silver paint, as Mariko scrubbed Catherine’s hair and arms. She winced as her friend’s hands moved over the swollen parts of her skull.
“He was the one on Mont Saint-Michel,” Catherine said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. He said his family wasn’t going to disappear…as though mine would. And as though other families would too. Like maybe Emile’s. And the Dreads would do nothing…”
“What are we going to tell my father?” Mariko asked, rinsing the soap from Catherine’s head and listening to nothing Catherine was saying. “Should we tell him the truth?”
Catherine looked down at her torn dress and the deep gashes in her left hand, where she’d clutched the broken glass.
“I think we’ll tell him the truth,” Mariko said, answering her own question—almost babbling. “We might have to fight that man now.”
“He’s dead, Mariko. We won’t have to fight him.”
“Well, his family, then—”
A phone rang.
Catherine recognized the ring—it was her own phone. Mariko dug through Catherine’s handbag, which lay on the floor, still stained with dark patches of blood. Catherine turned off the shower a
s Mariko held the phone out to her.
“It’s your mother,” she whispered.
Catherine’s mother. Of course. The woman sensed intuitively whenever Catherine was hiding something. But her attacker’s words came back to her: One of my brothers was in London today. Where did your family put the athame?
Shakily she took the phone from her friend, paused a moment to collect herself, then answered.
“Hello? Mum? Are you safe? Is the athame still safe?”
The voice on the other end of the line was her mother’s, but it was incoherent. A series of sobs came through, choked words half audible in between.
“Mum? Are you—”
“Your sister…” The words were garbled, and it took Catherine a moment to understand.
“What—Anna?”
“Anna,” her mother repeated, still struggling to be understood. “Anna’s dead.”
Quin and Shinobu looked out of the anomaly directly into a wide stream, and this gave Quin the strange sensation of peering across a flowing river of energy into an actual river. They were following the coordinates from the first of their three journal entries—the one that described the Middle Dread killing a Young Dread, back in the 1400s, and sinking his body in the deepest part of the river.
Shinobu jumped down into the water first, then turned to take her hand.
“It’s a bit cold,” he warned her.
Quin landed in the gentle current next to him, and the anomaly hovered for several moments behind them before it sewed itself closed. The water was knee high and cold but looked much deeper toward the middle of the river, where the flow was strong and unpredictable. It was early morning here—in Scotland, if their reading of the coordinates was correct.
“Come on, my pussy willow,” she said, pushing him toward the bank. “What’s cold to a Scotsman?”
“The Japanese side of me is very delicate,” he told her with mock gravity, looking anything but delicate as he tramped through the water toward shore. He wore a dark sweater and jeans, both of which were a bit too loose on him, but his shoulders were so broad that his backpack looked small on his back.
The river’s edge was lush with ferns growing beneath a canopy of oak trees. Shinobu grabbed at the foliage and hoisted himself from the water, then pulled Quin up next to him. They both stood, dripping, on the bank. Quin watched a grimace appear on his face, then disappear just as quickly. He’d insisted on another long practice with whipswords that morning, and she guessed that his injuries were bothering him, however much he tried to pretend they weren’t.
Shinobu unfolded their map and laid it across the moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree. Then he drew a positioning device from his jacket pocket. There they were, a dot blinking on the map screen, somewhere in northern Scotland. He zoomed in for a closer view, but there were no nearby landmarks. They were in the middle of nowhere, by a small river, which wasn’t much more than they already knew, and was frankly also a good description of almost anywhere in Scotland. He marked their location on the paper map.
“Think we’ve ever been here before?” he asked.
She shook her head as she studied the map. “Alistair took us so many places in Scotland when we were training, it’s hard to say.”
“According to the journal, there was once a fortress around here somewhere,” Shinobu said. “Though maybe not close enough to walk to. It said ‘a good journey from the stronghold.’ ”
Quin scanned their surroundings again. “The person who wrote the journal entry about this spot was hiding in the trees near the riverbank when the Middle killed that Young Dread. Should we wander a bit?”
“Sure.”
He folded up the map and tucked it away in a pocket. Again Quin caught a fleeting glimpse of pain in his face, but he said nothing.
They walked in ever widening arcs away from the riverbank. Quin wasn’t sure what they were looking for, except perhaps traces of what had happened with the Middle Dread—traces of what had been written about in the journal. Yet after an hour of pressing through the undergrowth at the side of the river, they had found nothing.
They decided to move on to the second journal entry. After following that new set of coordinates, they emerged from another anomaly into a dense thicket of large bushes within a broader forest clearing. The anomaly let them out slightly higher than Quin had expected, and she landed gracelessly on top of Shinobu.
“Ow.”
“Sorry. Was that your bad leg?”
“Yes, but it’s nothing,” he said as they climbed to their feet and picked their way out of the thicket.
When they got free of the confining branches, Quin saw that Shinobu was looking away from her, as though pain and ill temper had gotten hold of him.
“Hey,” she said, nudging him with the toe of her boot. “Are you all right? We can do this another day. I can take you back.”
“I’m fine,” he told her. He tried to smile, but it didn’t come off very well.
Quin brushed twigs from his hair and jacket, refusing to be pushed away by bad humor.
He asked her irritably, “Are you finished sorting my clothes?”
“Yes, I am. You’ve got a beetle in your hair, but it probably won’t hurt you.”
Quin, who knew he hated insects, was amused to watch him lean over and rake his hands across his head frantically.
“Is it gone?” he asked, straightening.
“Yes. You look quite beautiful.”
His very short hair was standing on end and pointing several directions, but despite this—or perhaps because of it—he did look rather beautiful.
“I hate when you use that word.”
His mood was darkening quickly, yet it had begun to remind her so much of times when he’d been cross as a child that she was surprised to find herself enjoying it a little bit.
“You hate the word ‘beautiful’?” she asked him.
“You used to call me beautiful,” he said, looking away from her to scan the forest around them, more out of vexation than actual interest in their surroundings. But Quin took the opportunity to study the environment herself. The trees and undergrowth were somewhat different here, but the air felt the same as it had in the first location. “And you meant ‘untouchable’ or ‘unlovable’—nothing good.”
“ ‘Sullen and bad-tempered,’ that’s probably what I meant,” she suggested, unable to resist teasing him. She’d spent so much time worried, it was a relief to poke fun now that he was out of danger from his injuries.
“You meant I looked like a painting or something— Can we get on with our search?”
“No.”
All at once she grasped the source of his bad mood.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” he asked.
“You never finished your tea before we left,” she told him, feeling like an idiot for not remembering sooner.
She’d gone to Master Tan’s that morning and brought back his daily medicinal tea, but Shinobu hadn’t drunk much of it. They’d been practicing with whipswords and exploring for hours now, and Master Tan’s tea was what made that sort of exertion possible. Shinobu was out of steam.
“I did drink it,” he said. “You watched me.”
“Give me the backpack.”
“I’ll check,” he told her, turning to keep the pack out of her reach.
He removed it from his back and turned away to search through it, as if he could more easily prove himself right without Quin looking. He turned around sheepishly a moment later with a nearly full bottle of tea in his hand.
“I packed it,” she said.
He set the bottle on the ground and looked at it balefully as he tied up the backpack and slung it over his shoulders. Even in the face of proof, he wasn’t ready to admit defeat.
“I don’t need tea right now,” he said. “Do I look like some frail grandmother to you?”
“A little.”
“But a ‘beautiful’ one, right?”
She put the bottle in his hands and k
issed his cheek. “Very beautiful. Now drink.”
Sullenly, he unscrewed the bottle and drank the whole thing in one go. When he was finished, he coughed and made a face, then bent over as though he might vomit up all of it. This happened every time he drank Master Tan’s tea, so Quin merely waited him out.
When he’d gotten over the rotten taste and had wiped his mouth on a sleeve, she asked, “Should we go back?”
He shook his head, and already she could see his good humor returning. Master Tan’s remedies worked quickly.
“I don’t want to go back. I’m not an invalid. I’m nearly healed.” He suppressed a smile, obviously aware of how childish he’d been. Still not quite meeting her eyes, he murmured, “I like it when you order me around.”
“I like it when you’re in a bad mood.”
“Thanks very much,” he said, beginning to explore the clearing before them.
“Doesn’t it remind you of the fights we used to have when we were little?” she asked, lacing her fingers through his as they walked. “Those were funny.”
“Like the time I threw tree sap in your hair and you punched me in the stomach?” Shinobu asked. “That was a barrel of laughs.”
Quin felt her own mood slip at the memory. “I’m still cross about that one.”
“We were six. You knocked the wind out of me.”
“My mother had to cut off a huge chunk of my hair, Shinobu.”
She shoved him away playfully, and now he was laughing.
“You sound angry,” he told her, suddenly looking very concerned. “Where’s your tea, Quin? Should we go back and brew up a batch for you?”
She grabbed at his jacket in mock fury, but stopped in the middle of the motion.
“Look,” she said, catching his elbow.
They’d been examining the large alder trees along the clearing’s border, whose branches nearly joined above them. Beyond one of the grandest trees it was possible to see quite a distance into the woods. Some way off was a fern-covered hillock, and in its side, though obscured from their current position by the forest undergrowth, was an opening that looked very much like the entrance to a cave.
“It’s what Catherine drew in the journal, isn’t it?” she said.
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