“How has it changed?” Garrett asked, the rumble of his voice suddenly hard.
“This is not the place,” the Wraith hissed, appearing out of the gloom beside them. “The others are getting settled upstairs. I believe it is time for a conference between the three of us—just like the old days, wouldn’t you say?”
Without waiting for an answer, the Wraith turned and glided toward the stairs. With a curt nod, Garrett followed it.
Paige watched them walk away for a moment, feeling her grasp over what was happening slipping away. It should have been up to her when and where they discussed the Brood’s plans—her plans.
But of course, the Wraith was right. With a sigh, she glanced around at her army, such as it was. This was not the place.
She hurried off after the others, her head throbbing in time with every step she took.
The day’s activities were well underway throughout the rest of the house. People ran this way and that, moving supplies, carrying trays, or delivering messages. The Brood was not the well-oiled machine she knew it could be, given time—but time was a luxury they could not afford.
They gathered in her study, Paige and Garrett sitting on either side of her desk, and the Wraith hovering behind them in the shadows. Someone, probably Sanista, had already laid out a tray of food and tea for them.
Wordlessly, Paige filled her cup. She did not offer to do so for Garrett, but he gave no sign that he’d noticed the slight. He picked up the pot and filled his own cup in silence.
“As Paige was saying,” the Wraith began, moving silently back and forth across the room as it spoke, “the situation has changed, Master Garrett. In fact, the situation continues to change in new and unexpected ways on practically a daily basis.”
Garrett sipped his tea, his gaze flicking between the others, his posture revealing nothing of his thoughts.
He doesn’t trust us, she realized, and the thought brought the first true anguish to her heart. She’d been irritated—exasperated as well—but this was torture. After all the years they’d known one another, how could he not have faith in her?
“Garrett,” she started, but Garrett raised his hand, and she fell silent.
“Let the Wraith tell it,” he told her. “At least for now.”
The knife in her heart twisted, and with it, a fresh stab of pain in her head.
“As you wish,” she said coolly, forcing the tremor from her voice.
She leaned back in her chair, listening to the Wraith’s words as she studied the cracks in the ceiling over her desk.
“We recently received intelligence that many of the attacks at Seven Skies and elsewhere, which have been attributed to the Dragon’s Brood, are not what they seem. As you doubtless remember, we ourselves believed disgruntled Broodsmen were to blame, unhappy with our, shall we say, lack of progress.”
Paige blinked. For a moment, she’d thought the cracks up there were moving like the delicate strands of a spider’s web, swaying in an autumn breeze. But of course, that was crazy.
“What we were told, and what circumstantial evidence we have obtained since seems to corroborate, is that Marianne herself is orchestrating these attacks.”
There was a long silence. Paige had never noticed how the cracks above her desk made a sort of spiral pattern in the stained and ancient plaster. They pulsed and rippled in time with the dull thudding in her head, making her guts shift uneasily. She closed her eyes.
“Killing her own people?” Garrett asked. His voice held a note of disgusted wonder more than incredulity. “To what end?”
“To garner support among her own people against the Dragon’s Brood, we believe.”
“That’s madness.”
Paige jumped a little at the sound of Garrett slamming his teacup down on her desk, and her brain seemed to swell. It felt too big for her skull, and as it grew, so did the headache.
Angrily, she pulled herself together and sat up straighter, opening her eyes to look at Garrett.
“Don’t you have something stronger?” Garrett growled.
“Something stronger could be arranged, I suppose,” the Wraith rasped, amused.
“There’s more,” Paige said, her voice sounding distant and strangely muffled in her own ears, and the others turned to regard her.
“Oh, yes,” the Wraith said. “There is always more.”
Paige clenched her fists under the desk, and the bright pain as her fingernails dug into her palms seemed to bring the world back into focus around her. She forced her lips to part—forced the words out between them. How was it that no one could see her discomfort? Or did they simply not care; did Garrett not care?
“We’ve received reports that Marianne is recalling her men back to Seven Skies. It’s only a matter of time before they march to Coalhaven. Marianne has her spies, just as we do, and she must know we are here by now, even if she doesn’t know exactly where. We mean to be ready when they arrive, Garrett. We mean to take them down.”
“And you’re crazier than Marianne,” Garrett said, rising to his feet and leaning over the desk toward her. “If she’s amassing an army, you’ll be outnumbered three to one at the very least. You won’t stand a chance. The Brood will be wiped out.”
“There is more to our plan,” the Wraith murmured, almost to itself, “but I hesitate to share it until we know you will stand with us, Master Garrett.”
Paige could see Garrett struggling to hold his tongue, and she had to fight to keep from smiling despite her pounding head. This was right; this was the way it always had been. The two of them arguing out the merits of various courses of action until Paige would step in with the final decision.
“All right,” Garrett said, a note of forced calm in his voice. “I’ve heard you out, and now you are going to listen to me—well, to us, really. You both need to hear what happened with the boy. It changes everything.”
“I doubt that,” Paige said, and Garrett glared at her. “But,” she amended, “we will listen. We…I owe you that much, Garrett. Go and get the others.” She turned to the Wraith. “Would you arrange for Sanista to bring in a few more chairs? Fresh tea as well, I think.”
The Wraith performed a mock bow, leaving no doubt what it thought of being recruited as servant, but Paige ignored it. She was simply in too much pain to care. She watched impassively as they left her study, waiting as the door swung shut behind them, and then she sank back in her chair again with an explosive exhalation.
Her eyes, almost of their own accord, sought out the pattern of cracks above her, like a tongue exploring the empty socket of a recently vacated tooth. They had a swollen look to them, like the gangrenous lips of a festering wound.
It was as though they’d been waiting for her to look up again. The cracks began to lengthen, spiraling outward from an ever widening hole. Fear, more pleasurable than truly terrifying, shot through her, and her heart thudded in her ears, bringing with it fresh pain through her skull. She wanted to move; she wanted to cry out. She found that she could do neither. The pain was too great. Weariness held her fast, as surely as if she were bound to the chair.
The hole in the ceiling above her grew larger by degrees, and as it did, a pair of feet, clad in cracked and decaying loafers caked in mud, appeared in its depths. They descended through the hole as far as their owner’s knees, revealing the cuffs of dismally torn and ragged trousers. The stench of old booze and stale tobacco wafted down to her, and suddenly she was looking up into the face of the drunkard, Jack, who’d first come to her with news of Marianne’s deceit.
He was seated on the edge of the hole, looking down at her through his strangely mismatched eyes. The milky film over the bad one rippled and squirmed slightly, as if something beneath it was trying to break free from the confines of its socket.
He was dressed as he had been the first time she’d seen him, in his ragged, dirty coat and trousers. He grinned at her, showing all his jagged and broken teeth.
“Good morning, miss Paige,” he said ch
eerily, turning over a gold holder in his hands absently as he spoke. She didn’t want to look at that coin, and yet it was all she could do not to.
No response came to her lips. She only stared. The pain her head was nearly blinding now, and it felt like even the simple act of speaking would crack her skull in two.
“Cat got your tongue? Oh, well, no matter.” He laughed. It was a short, harsh sound that ended as abruptly as it had begun. He brought his hands together between his knees, clasping the coin between his palms, and leaned over her. It seemed impossible that he could sit that way without falling through the hole and onto her desk, but somehow, he just went on defying the laws of physics.
“You are running out of time, Miss Paige,” he said, a note of severe disappointment in his voice. “It isn’t entirely your fault. Your friends took their sweet time in getting here, but the other is not far behind. You must do it today.”
Paige felt her lips moving, and heard her own voice, before she realized she was answering.
“I know,” she murmured, and her tongue felt numb and too big for her mouth.
“Very good then, Miss Paige.”
Jack pulled open his coat, apparently to drop the coin into an inside pocket, and she caught a brief glimpse of something that glowed red and angry from its depths. Whatever it was, it hurt her eyes, and they snapped closed of their own accord. Tears escaped from between the lids. The pain in her head was excruciating.
She heard a thump from outside, and she sat up as Sanista came through the door, clumsily carrying an old wooden chair in her arms.
The girl caught sight of her at the same time, and her face drained of color. She dropped the chair and ran around the desk toward her.
“Are yeh a’right, miss?” she cried. “S’matter with yeh? D’yeh need a healer?”
Paige blinked, confused.
“I’m fine, Sanista.”
“But beggin’ yer pardon, miss, yeh’re ever so pale.”
“I’m fine,” Paige snarled.
The girl stumbled backward, as if Paige had struck her.
“I’m…I’m sorry,” she said timidly, and she turned, trembling, to retrieve the chair she dropped beside the door.
Paige leaned back once more. She must’ve dozed off for a minute or two while she was waiting for the others to come back. Her headache was much better—almost gone, in fact.
Her eyes found the crack in the ceiling over her desk. She probably should have someone patch that. Autumn was slipping by, soon it would be Samhain, and then winter would come. She wouldn’t want a leak right over her desk, now would she?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Haake stared down at the old safe house and savored what a relief it was to have the sun setting at last. The sun was too damn hot, despite the wind’s autumn chill that bit deeper with each passing day. The sunlight hurt his eyes, too—or maybe that was just the sting of the sweat that ran out of his hair and into his eyes in a ceaseless stream. His palms were slick; his clothes clung to his body; he could feel beads of moisture creeping slowly down his sides and chest like slow fat flies; in fact, he couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be dry, and a tiny tickle in the back of his mind kept whispering about dehydration.
That voice was easy to ignore, though; he knew he was right as rain. And besides, he had something more pressing on his mind—the ramshackle ruin that stood at the bottom of the gully below. He glared at it, as if he could project his enmity toward it like a physical thing and send the rotting boards and crumbling stones tumbling down in one final, fatal crash.
He shifted his weight a little where he crouched, and the crunch of the leaves beneath him caused his heart to beat faster. He could feel each of those beats in his face, hear them in his ears, see them as flashing spots before his eyes. There was no one close enough to hear; he was a fool, and he knew it. He forced himself to take slow breaths until his heart slowed. Absently, he wiped more sweat out of his eyes.
What was he doing here, anyway? He’d sworn—sworn on all that was holy from both sides of his parentage—that he would not return to this godforsaken pit of hell. He had never wanted to see the safe house’s moldy old carcass ever again. So why was he here? Why, goddammit? Here…where it had all started…
The more the question gnawed away at his brain, the harder his heart pounded against his ribs, and the brighter and faster the spots before his eyes flashed in time with it. He could feel the memories closing in around him like hungry predators in the dark—and he, the frightened, hunted creature, could not run.
“Half-breed,” they called him.
“Monster,” they’d said, though he’d looked human—and certainly less like an accident of nature than the flyers.
But of course, it wasn’t about the way he looked; it had never been about that. It was about the way he moved. His jerky, yet unerringly precise motions that had repulsed them…reminded them of what he was, if only in part.
Perhaps if it had only been the taunts, he could have learned to live with it. But he could see in their eyes; he knew that they knew—knew the truth that none would ever want to learn about themselves, let alone see jeering back at them from the eyes of their peers.
And that was, he supposed, why he’d let them torment him in the end—poking him first with their sticks to watch him twitch, and then later with their knives and their needles when they’d wanted to see what made him tick.
A muscle spasmed in his thigh, and he shivered as the sweat on his body began to cool in the evening air. Suddenly, without the punishing heat of the sun, it felt bitterly cold out among the bushes and the trees. He was so thirsty! He hadn’t quite appreciated just how thirsty he was until the sun had gone.
Water, water, dripping, dropping, but not a drop to drink…
“Good evening, Mr. Haake,” a voice called cheerily, breaking through his daze, and Haake nearly fell over into the brush.
Clumsily, he steadied himself and spun around, staring first up the slope the way he’d come, then into the trees, and finally back down toward the house. He saw no one, though lights were beginning to appear in the windows, making them gleam like the eyes of a kitsper.
“Who’s there?” he hissed, trying to blink away the spots that had returned in full force before his eyes. “Where are you?” His tongue felt like paper in his mouth, and the words came out in a croak, as if they were as brittle as the leaves beneath his knees.
Whoever it was clicked his own tongue disapprovingly. “Up here, Mr. Haake. My goodness, but you are as dim as ever.”
Haake looked up, bewildered, and then he saw it.
The moon had risen, well on its way to full. It hung low in the sky, looking so close that he thought perhaps he could reach out and touch it—but he wouldn’t want to. He stared, and the moon stared back through a pair of mismatched eyes. One was dark and full of cunning and poorly concealed glee; the other rippled and frothed like the unsettled waters of a distant ocean. The moon smiled, revealing jagged and broken teeth.
“I see you’re right on time,” the moon said. “Most satisfactory. Perhaps I will be persuaded to put in a good word for you when the time comes.” It chuckled, as if this was a very funny joke.
“Jack, isn’t it?” Haake mumbled, leaning back against a tree and craning his neck to stare up into the moon’s craggy features.
The moon seemed to dip slightly, dropping toward the horizon before snapping back to its rightful position again.
“Right in one, Mr. Haake. Perhaps there is hope for you yet.”
Haake closed his eyes. Looking at that disembodied face in the sky was doing unpleasant things to his stomach. Best not to look at it at all, he decided. Maybe even better to just pretend it wasn’t there.
But no, there were things he wanted to know, and he thought Jack would tell him.
“Why am I here?” he asked. “I don’t want to be here.”
“Well, as the song says, you can’t always get what you want. You need something though
, I’ll wager, don’t you, Mr. Haake?”
Haake’s eyes snapped open, seemingly of their own accord, and he found Jack leaning over him with the bristles of his ragged beard nearly brushing Haake’s cheek. He could smell the sweet and sour aroma of tobacco and old booze mixing with the stench of his own sweat. There was another smell, too, beneath the others—something faint and nostalgic, like the dissipating fragrance of an old match.
“Yes,” Haake whispered, and the breath of that word seemed to catch in his throat. He shivered again.
“Very good then.” Jack took a step away, reaching into a pocket of his coat and pulling out a large gold coin. “Your end of the bargain is nearly done, and it won’t be so difficult to complete really…or so unpleasant.”
Haake watched, fascinated, as Jack turned the coin over and over between his fingers. Moonlight—perfectly ordinary moonlight from a perfectly ordinary moon—flashed off the dirty metal, and each flash seem to send daggers through his eyes and into his brain. He wanted to look away, he wanted to close his eyes, but he found that he could not.
“What do you want me to do?”
“You know what to do. Don’t you remember why the Hichen sent you after them?”
Haake did remember—sort of. It all seemed like a dream from a very long time ago now.
“The boy,” he murmured, almost to himself.
“That’s right—the boy. The half-breed boy.” The emphasis was subtle—subtle enough to perhaps be dismissed as accidental.
“Half-breed,” Haake echoed. Yes, that was true. That boy—that abomination—he was a half-breed, too.
“He is,” Jack agreed, as though he was reading Haake’s thoughts. “But they’re not tormenting him down there, I dare say, the way they tormented you.”
“No.”
They wouldn’t be. They’d be doting on the little monster as if he were a normal, human child, and not the cold, scaly thing that had come slithering from its mother’s warm human womb.
Haven Divided Page 25
