“Oh no no no, my fine sir,” says the man, and even from here she can smell the wreak of booze that envelops him like a malignant shroud. “This isn’t about me at all. This is about you. You see, I can give you what you want.”
She takes another step back, and the track in her mind that belongs to Corbbmacc begins to race, calculating the chances of getting back inside the house before this man can grab hold of him—her—them.
“How would you know what I want?” she asks, stalling for time.
Come back, Mona, she thinks. Come back…
“Why, it’s plainly written on your face, Master Corbbmacc,” the man says, and though it is patently impossible, it almost seems like one of the oversized eyes painted on the mask winks at her.
He knows your name, Emily thinks wildly.
He knows my name, Corbbmacc echoes in her head.
“You,” the man goes on slowly in the tone of someone explaining that two and two make four, “want to go out for Samhain.”
Her heart skips a beat, because what the man says is true.
“You want to smell the popcorn. You want to taste the sweets! You want to hear the music, dance the dances…maybe even kiss a girl or two, eh? Isn’t that right?”
And of course it is right. Of course it is.
“I’ll be happy to escort you, Master Corbbmacc. I know the secrets of Samhain—secrets that few have even dreamt of. I know the places where real magic is brought to bear, dens where dreams come true, and houses where the hospitality is simply divine.”
Corbbmacc is no longer thinking about the door behind him or the safety that lies beyond it. His mind is full of visions of Samhain. His heart is slowing, and the fear is melting away.
No! she shrieks at him, but she isn’t really here. She can’t stop him, but she can’t keep herself from trying, even as Corbbmacc’s fading terror overwhelms her own sense of self.
“That is what you want, isn’t it?” the man persists. “To dream and wander and see Samhain as few ever get to? To dance with the devils and hunt with the hounds?”
She does not sense the moment when Corbbmacc decides; she does not hear the thought. She only feels the motion and watches the world dip before her as he nods.
The feeling makes her dizzy. Nausea claws at her insides. Never has this sense of being two souls in one body been so acute, and the disorientation is more than she can bear. They are one; they are two; they are whole; they are divided; and the intimacy is an agony.
“Excellent!” the man cries, and she moves forward toward him.
“Now now, young master! Being your chaperone is thirsty work. You don’t expect me to do all that for free, do you?”
She stops. She feels Corbbmacc’s unease threaten to return. It mixes with her own, the two coiling together until she cannot tell one from the other.
“What do you want?”
“Just a holder. I can see that you’ve got one in your pocket there. Just a holder for a night’s work well done. Is it worth it to you, Master Corbbmacc?”
Her hand sneaks into her pocket, and her fingers close around the single coin there.
“I only have the one,” she says. “What about the popcorn and the sweets?”
“You won’t need money. Remember, I know the secret places where anything you wish for will be yours. I told you.”
She feels Corbbmacc pulling the coin out of his pocket. It is cold against the palm of her hand. She feels both his eagerness and his uncertainty at war with one another. It is all the money he has in the world. He’d planned on using it to buy ice cream or some other unimaginable delicacy awaiting him out there amidst the laughing children and the stalls and tents and carriages.
“You’ll take me if I give you this?”
“I will indeed, Master Corbbmacc. You have my word. Jack never lies.”
Slowly, she extends her hand and opens her fingers. The coin gleams in the moonlight as it lies on her palm.
The man, Jack, reaches out to take the coin, and as he does, she hears a sound. Corbbmacc’s muddled brain does not know what it is, but Emily’s does. It is the patter of bare feet across stone.
Both she and the man turn at the same moment toward the sound, and a tiny figure, wrapped in a filthy sheet, hurtles out of the darkness.
“Samhain, Samhain,” the girl singsongs, her blonde hair streaming out behind her like a veil. She snatches the coin from Corbbmacc’s hand and takes off down the street.
“Come back here, you bitch!” the man suddenly roars. He turns and starts after her, letting his paper mask fall to the cobbles. Emily catches a fleeting glimpse of his face with its mismatched eyes, one of them filmed over with a milky cataract, before both figures are lost in the dark.
And though that man’s face was no better than the hideous mask that now lay in the street and which is, even now, being trampled by the careless feet of oblivious adolescents, it is the girl’s face that remains in her mind.
Celine, looking more like the girl Emily had met on the boat coming into Seven Skies than the crone she has become, had been peeking out of that face. How old? Seven? Eight? Here, not far from Corbbmacc.
She wants to follow them. She wants to make sure the man does not catch up with the helpless orphan.
But terror has reasserted its hold on Corbbmacc’s trembling form. She knows that the panic will soon overwhelm him, and he will flee back into the house.
She fights him as he forces her to turn. One step…two steps…across the porch.
They are one; they are two; they are whole; they are divided.
They are nothing.
***
The heat still burned in her cheeks as she came abruptly back to herself. She opened her eyes and found Corbbmacc’s face not two inches from hers. The warmth spread into her ears, and then her neck, as she realized they were laying in a heap on a bed of pine needles, their limbs tangled together.
Gently, she extracted herself from him, sitting up and brushing her hair out of her eyes. She felt strangely hollow, as if part of herself was missing now that she was alone inside her own skin.
Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them back as the memory of the tears that had streamed down Corbbmacc’s face lingered. Self-consciously, she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, rocking slowly to and fro. She didn’t want to feel this. She was fine. She was herself—just Emily—and that was the way it should be.
Corbbmacc watched her as if he’d never seen her properly before, his face pale and his eyes wide.
“What the hell just happened?” he asked finally, his voice low and strained.
Emily stared back at him, unnerved to see he was trembling, almost uncontrollably, just like the boy he had been on that long ago night.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I fainted, I guess.”
“Bullshit,” Corbbmacc said. He sat up as well, brushing away the pine needles that clung to his shoulders. “You were there. I heard you. I felt you.”
Emily didn’t say anything; she only looked at him. What could she say? Had they shared the vision the way she’d shared Celine’s when she’d healed Michael? How could that be? Corbbmacc was just a boy. He didn’t have anything like the knowing or Celine’s ability to heal.
“It was Samhain,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “Eight years ago.”
For a long moment, they only looked at one another.
“You saw that, too?” she asked at last. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but there seemed little point in pretending it hadn’t happened. She tried to meet his gaze, failed, and looked down at her knees instead.
“Yeah, I did. What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know.”
Corbbmacc’s intensity was unnerving her. He wanted answers, but she had none to give; she was the girl with all the questions, after all. Why this particular memory? Why now? If only she could exercise some measure of control over the knowing…
Emily looked up into
the branches above them, thinking of the man with his painted goblin mask. She thought of his face as he’d dropped it and pursued Celine into the night. She shivered.
Not a man, a voice said inside her head. Not a man—a ghost.
“…First we make a ghost, of the man we love the most…”
“That really happened, you know.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I never doubted it.”
“I did,” he said, looking away. “I’ve tried not to remember that night. It was so unreal. It seemed more like a dream…something that happened to someone else. I’ve tried not to think of it. It was Celine, wasn’t it? Celine who took the holder.”
“Yes, it was.”
“I never realized…”
They both looked back the way they’d come through the trees. They could just make out Celine’s sleeping form beside the little campfire. Rascal was sitting up in her lap, staring back at them impassively.
“Do you think he took it from her?” Corbbmacc asked.
A flash of terror so immense it was nearly crippling shot through Emily. It was queerly disconnected from her mind—a thing made more of instinct than rational thought. It was, somehow, not entirely unlike the knowing.
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The low rumble of thunder roused Emily from the stupor she’d drifted into while trudging along the narrow trail that wound down out of the mountains. Her head snapped up, producing an audible crack at the base of her neck. Wincing, she scanned the sky. Far to the southwest, a huge mass of darkness loomed at the horizon, a deep, unfriendly purple against the blue.
Great, she thought wearily, just what we need.
Sighing, she tore her gaze away from the pregnant clouds and glanced back up the trail. Corbbmacc had fallen far behind, slowed by an exhausted Celine leaning heavily on his arm. How much longer could the girl cope with nights spent on the cold earth, exposed to the elements and the falling temperatures, frail as she was? True, the weather had warmed some as they’d come down off the mountain, following the trail of small campfires left behind by whoever was ahead of them, but autumn was well and truly setting in now and bringing its promise of the winter to come.
As if underscoring her thoughts, a gust of wind came rolling down off the mountain, hissing through the trees and scattering multicolored leaves from their bows like so much cheap confetti. Something howled—a coyote?—sending its long and plaintive cry out over the desert that stretched without end to the south and east. She couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. Ahead? Behind? Between the flat, rolling wastes on one side and the echoes from the rocky mountains on the other, it seemed to come from everywhere—or nowhere. The creature that had loosed it could be fifty miles away—or fifty feet.
And now a bitch of a storm was coming. Damn.
She looked back to the southwest, trying to gauge how much time they had, but like the coyote’s howl, it was impossible to judge. The foothills through which they were descending gave way to flat, desolate land all across the southern horizon, broken only here and there by tufts of dry brush, yellowing grasses, and barren trees.
As she watched, a thin line of yellow brilliance arched its way across the smudge of dark clouds, ripping them apart like damp tissue.
“One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand…” she whispered, counting off the seconds automatically.
As her lips formed the word “seven”, another rumble of thunder reached her ears, causing a crow with two sets of wings, perched on a tree nearby, to let out a startled caw and take flight. She watched it go, wishing idly she could flee from here with such graceful ease.
She wasn’t at all sure how accurate the old idea of counting off the seconds to gauge a storm’s distance was, but six or seven miles seemed about right.
If the approaching storm was even half as bad as it looked, it hardly mattered how many more nights Celine could withstand the elements; they’d all need shelter tonight.
Double damn.
She waited for the others to catch up, her eyes flicking nervously between her approaching friends and the oncoming storm. She wondered which would reach her first. Certainly, the clouds were growing darker at an alarming rate.
“Doesn’t look good, does it?” Corbbmacc said as he and Celine drew abreast of her. Rascal leapt down from Celine’s shoulders and sniffed at the dying scrub grass beside the trail, then paused and sat back on his haunches, following the gazes of his human companions.
“No, it doesn’t.”
They exchanged a look. Celine was wheezing, clinging to Corbbmacc’s arm to stay on her feet. She said nothing, only sent a weary glance toward the storm and then away again. Another gust of wind blew her hair away from her face, and Emily saw her shoulders hunch against the cold.
“You okay, Cel?”
Celine smiled wanly. “Sure. I ain’t gonna be runnin’ no races or nothin’, but I’m a’right.”
“We can stop—”
“Don’t be stupid, Em.” Celine’s eyes cut back to the bank of clouds coming toward them, and as they did, another flash of lightning tore through their midst. Her voice softened. “I’m a’right for a bit farther. Maybe we can find a cave or somethin’.”
Celine was right, of course; they really couldn’t afford to stop for rest. They needed to find somewhere to take shelter—and soon. Celine’s face was pale, the lines at the corners of her eyes deepening with each day that slipped away.
A flash of Emily’s fury toward the wizard and his heartless manipulations returned for an instant, as harsh and bright as the lightning, before burning out again, smothered by her pity and regret. The regret was the hardest to come to terms with; she didn’t honestly know what she would have—or could have—done differently. She’d had to help Michael. She’d tried to save Celine. It was so unfair that one had come at the price of the other.
Blinking furiously, Emily nodded, shifted the weight of Garrett’s bow on her back, and turned to continue down the path ahead of her friends.
The trail eventually spilled out onto a road of dusty hardpan as they came down out of the foothills. The terrain leveled out—loose gravel and rocky outcroppings giving way to stunted trees and dry brush. The transition from mountain to desert seemed less abrupt from down here, but no less striking.
As evening approached, they came to another cold campfire just before the road bent back around the base of the mountain to the northeast. Emily kicked at the ash and cinders as she passed, looking for any sign—any clue at all—as to the nature of the person or persons who had left them. Reaver scouts, maybe? Certainly, whoever it was had been making far better time coming down off the mountain than Emily’s little band, hampered as they were by Celine’s frailty.
…Her age. Think of it as her age; that’ll make it easier.
Only that didn’t make it easier, and worse, it was a lie. So young…Celine was so young; far too young for what she’d been through, far too young for what had been done to her—done to her by that hateful, hateful wizard.
An image of Daniel rose in her mind then, unbidden and unwanted. She saw him tied to the top of that wagon, still and bloody and so very small. He, too, was far too young.
She rounded the bend, prepared to scan the mountainside to her left for any caves or crevices, and stopped in surprise.
A few hundred yards ahead, looming over the widening road, was an enormous stone archway carved into the shape of four gargantuan snakes, two entwined with one another on each side. At the arch’s apex, two of the hideous things faced her, their mouths open wide to show wickedly sharp fangs and two delicately forked tongues. She could just make out the backs of the other two heads, turned away from her and staring farther down the road. Even from here, she could appreciate the breathtaking level of detail, from the thousands of tiny scales to the shiny glint in the monsters’ pupilless eyes.
Beyond the arch, barely visible in the growing darkness, was a small collection of buil
dings rising up from the pools of shadows like the prows of great ships. A town? She could see no one out amidst the structures, but perhaps they were all huddled inside, sheltering against the storm slowly devouring the sky. She cocked her head, listening, but no sound came to her.
“What is it?” Corbbmacc called from behind her. “Is it a cave?”
Emily didn’t respond; she just stared into the dark alleys between the buildings, trying to penetrate their depths. They’d have to go there for shelter, but the prospect made her uneasy. What sort of people would be living out here, totally isolated, with only the mountains on one side of their little community and the sprawling desolation of the desert on the other? Monsters? Hellions? Celine’s words came back to her. There weren’t supposed to be any people this far east of Marianne’s kingdom.
Corbbmacc and Celine came to stand beside her, surveying the road ahead. The harsh rasp of Celine’s breaths seemed very loud in the sudden silence. Even the winds had fallen still.
The calm before the storm, she thought—and shivered.
“Thank the gods,” Corbbmacc said. He started forward, pulling Celine along with him.
“Wait,” Emily said, her voice low as she reached out and caught his arm. He stopped, looking back at her with a touch of impatience in his face, eyebrows raised.
“We’re running out of time,” he said, inclining his head toward the clouds that gathered behind them. As if to punctuate his words, another flare of lightning, this time painfully bright, illuminated the pale streaks of gold in his hair. It was followed almost at once by a roar of thunder, far louder than any they’d yet heard. It split the silence like impending doom, rolling out across the empty desert sands on one side and bouncing back from the rocky mountainside on the other.
“We should be careful,” Emily told him, raising her voice to be heard. She’d seen enough of this world to be wary of demons in the shadows—demons everywhere. Haven my ass.
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