The watcher who made my shoulders itch, that one was not desperate, just . . . predatory.
But the ghost was worrisome, too.
“I think it might be smarter not to talk about dead friends while we are here,” I told Aiden. “Can you tell how much farther?”
“Not far,” he said. “But I thought that was Underhill watching us, and it wasn’t. I think we should move faster.”
He broke into a jog that I kept up with easily—one thing I do very well is run. I could have maintained that pace for hours. Knowing that Adam was behind us was the only thing that kept me from looking.
Normally, running is the last thing I would do when I thought we were being pursued. But Aiden had survived this place for a very long time, and he was, as Jesse said, our guide.
We topped the rise and found ourselves on a flat, broad plain with waist-high grass. The wind whipped through the grass and sent the few stray hairs that had escaped my braiding this morning straight into my eyes. A huge old tree stood in the middle of the plain, and about thirty feet up the thick trunk, there was a tree house perched where the trunk split into three.
“Run,” shouted Aiden, heading for the tree at full speed.
Adam hesitated, looking behind us—but there was only the endless plain. If there was something hidden in the grass, the wind disguised its passage.
“Don’t ignore your experts,” I told Adam. “Run.”
I bolted, catching up to Aiden in ten strides. The kid could run—but I could run, too, and my legs were longer. Beside me, Adam followed at an easy lope.
Aiden ran like a sprinter, head back, arms and legs pumping as fast as he could. Ahead of us, I could see that, though there were hand- and footholds carved into the side of the tree, the first ten feet were smooth.
“I’m going to go ahead,” I told Aiden. “When I get to the tree, I’m going to make a foot pocket of my hands. I want you to step into it, and I’ll toss you up.”
He nodded, and I threw myself forward, imitating Aiden’s very good technique. Adam stayed with Aiden. I spun when I reached the tree, letting the trunk on my back eat up the excess momentum. I laced my fingers, and Aiden, not slowing a bit, stuck his boot in my hands and I tossed him up. He landed on the tree like a spider monkey and scrambled up.
Adam braced on his hind legs, and I put one foot on his chest and used that as a step stool to get my hands up high enough, and I climbed as quickly as I could, because Adam wasn’t going to start up until I was all the way.
Aiden waited on the crude little porch in front of the tree house, his back against the wall, breathing hard through his mouth, sweat dampening his shirt. He smelled like fear.
“Come on, come on, come up,” he chanted. “What’s taking him so long?”
“I’m up,” I shouted, scuttling over the edge of the porch on all fours.
With the howl of the hunt in his throat, Adam sank his claws into the trunk and climbed the tree with the grace of a jaguar. Werewolf shoulders are built more like those of a bear or a cat. It meant that they were excellent climbers.
Aiden opened the door of the house and waved his hand at me. There wasn’t room on the porch for all three of us, so I wasted no time getting inside. Adam came in after me and Aiden after him, shutting the door firmly and locking it.
Something hit the tree and rocked it.
“You lost,” Aiden yelled. “Go about your business.”
Something roared, and I had the feeling that my ears weren’t picking up the whole thing—as if some of that roar wasn’t just sound. Skittering sounds came from the walls and the ceiling. There were no windows in the tree house and part of me was grateful. Whatever was making that noise sounded like a thousand rats or something with a thousand legs. Most of me hated hearing a threat I could not see.
Adam snarled.
“You lost,” said Aiden again. “This is doing you no good. If you don’t leave, I’ll light my wards.”
That horrible aching roar traveled through the walls and into my skull, sending hot pain through my nervous system.
“I warned him,” said Aiden. “He should know better.”
He pressed his hand on the door and . . . his magic wasn’t as big as what Beauclaire had used on the bridge, but it was plenty big enough to make me sit down on the floor harder than I’d meant to. There was a whoomph sound, like when a gas burner is turned on—only an order of magnitude bigger than that.
Silence fell.
Aiden took his hand from the door and shook it. “It won’t have killed him—not the flames nor the fall from the tree—but he won’t come up here again for a while.”
“What was that?” I asked.
Aiden shrugged. “I call him the Unseen. I don’t actually know what he is supposed to be. He’s one of the things that escaped from the prisons the fae left behind, and a lot of them started out as fae. He’s difficult to see except in strong sunlight. He’s slow, or he’d have killed me a long time ago.”
He looked around the room and blew out a huff of air. “Welcome to my home. It’s safe here—as safe as anywhere in Underhill. We can spend the night and look for a way back out tomorrow. The artifact is here.”
Now that we didn’t have unknown monsters trying to get in and eat us, I looked around. Without windows, the interior was dark except for a little light that snuck in between the hand-hewn boards—that looked more like they’d been scavenged than cut to build this tree house. The widths would be consistent for a section, then change. Right next to the door, there was a panel that was six or seven feet wide. Another plank looked more like a tabletop than a board.
Aiden lit some beeswax candles. Maybe if I’d been human, it would still have been too dim, but I see pretty well in the dark.
The room was big enough, maybe fifteen feet square. Rough shelves lined three of the walls and held a collection of treasures—literally in some cases. A bird’s feather was displayed next to an elaborate silver crown studded with cabochon gems set in silver flowers and vines. In a world where you were mostly alone, the feather was as valuable as the crown. There were books, too, but not very many—none that I could have read.
On the fourth wall there were a pair of wardrobes. The first was itself a work of art. Every bit of the wardrobe was elaborately carved in abstract designs. The second, like the walls of the tree house, was cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things.
“I’ve never had anyone in here,” Aiden told me. “I built this after most of the others were already dead.”
“It’s charming,” I told him, seriously.
“Aboveground gives you a lot of protection,” he told me. “The first one I built here had windows—that was a mistake.”
He opened the elaborate wardrobe and pulled out some thick rag rugs and threw them at random on the floor. “I sleep . . . slept on piles of these,” he said. “We can use the bedrolls, but the rugs will soften the floor.”
“Sounds good to me,” I told him. In lieu of speech, Adam stretched out on one of the rugs and rested his muzzle on his front legs. “Adam approves, too.”
“I might as well get the artifact,” he said, and opened the second wardrobe. As soon as the doors separated, I could feel a wave of power.
The wardrobe was split into two halves. The right half had shelves filled with bright-colored fabric bags of all sorts of sizes and colors, with small boxes of bone, wood, or lacquer, and larger, jewelry-box-sized boxes. The bottom shelf was full of folded cloth. The left side held staves and swords and pole arms of all kinds.
“Are these all artifacts?” I asked.
He nodded. “I keep them in this wardrobe because it doesn’t let the power leak. Around here, power attracts attention.”
“When the fae come back,” I said slowly, “could someone find your house and your treasures?”
He shook his head. “
Once a place belongs to you, it belongs to you. No one will ever be able to find this place unless I’m with them. No one can come inside unless I invite them in. It’s how Underhill was set up—and even she can’t change the rules. That’s why, even though she’s mad at me, she couldn’t actually make us wander for long before I found my home. If I die, Underhill will reclaim what is here. She has her own treasure rooms—I’ve seen them. Some of this stuff comes from there.”
I looked at the contents of the wardrobe. “Don’t ever tell anyone this is here,” I told him. “The fae would never have let you go if they knew what you have.”
He nodded, reached in to the shelves, and brought out a small box and opened it. The box he put back on the shelf. In his hand was a crude bronze key. He gave it to me, then closed the doors of the wardrobe.
The key was warm in my hands.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Pressed against a door, it makes any door a gateway to Underhill,” he said. “If you keep in mind where in Underhill you want to appear, that doorway will take you there.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Underhill isn’t opposed to sharing knowledge,” he told me. “Not if she’s in a good mood.”
He looked unhappily at the key in my hand, and thinking he was worried I wanted it, I handed it back to him. But, though he closed his hands on it and stuffed it in a pocket of his jeans, the scent of his unhappiness didn’t change.
“It’s a good pick,” I told him. “Not a weapon, but valuable all the same.”
“She never abandoned me,” he told me. “She gets very lonely.” He looked up at me. “Am I doing the right thing?”
“You aren’t doing anything wrong,” I told him. “There might be other right things you could do, but that’s not the same as doing something wrong. She isn’t alone anymore.”
He snorted. “The fae. They don’t appreciate her—they use her like a slave, with no more thought to her than they give their shoes—less.”
And that didn’t sound like someone repeating a rant they’d heard once too often, I thought.
“We’ll tell Beauclaire that’s how she feels about the fae. Maybe they can do something about it,” I told him. “If you want to stay here, that’s something different. But thinking that you are the only one who can possibly keep her company—that’s a trap.”
—
We ate lunch from our packs and drank from our canteens.
“Is there a reason that we need to sleep here instead of heading out?” I asked, gathering our garbage and, after putting it into a plastic bag, stuffing it into the pack.
“It might take us a while to find a door to leave,” he said. “I can hurry it along a bit—that’s the real trick. Underhill can’t seal the doors from the inside, but she can make it hard to find them. That’s why she locked the fae out, and not in.” He got to his feet and paced a bit. “Night’s dangerous, more dangerous, here. It’s safer if we leave at first light in the morning.”
And this was lunchtime. I looked at Aiden pacing and exchanged a glance with Adam.
“Okay,” I said brightly. “While we wait for nighttime, why don’t we tell each other stories?”
So I told him about Bran, the Marrok, and what growing up a coyote in the woods of northwestern Montana had been like. He told me stories about living in Underhill, the creatures terrible and wonderful who made their homes here. Once he warmed up, he was a pretty good storyteller—and I developed a new perspective on Underhill, who had first appeared to him as a small girl, though she sometimes was a great lady or an animal.
She was not evil, just . . . thoughtless. She was like a toddler who breaks her toys because she doesn’t know any better. Doesn’t realize that once they are broken, they will never play with her again. After she had killed Aiden’s friend Willy, she had mourned him for a very long time. But she didn’t learn from her errors—it sounded as though she’d been hardwired to be who she was.
She had damaged Aiden more than she would have been able to if she had truly been evil, I thought. Because sometimes she was funny and good company, and at other times she was vicious. She couldn’t, herself, hurt someone. But she could taint food, turn the weather foul, or attract one of the dangerous ones (Aiden’s term) wherever she wanted. Aiden was alive because Underhill loved him.
Eventually, the storytelling wound down, and we ate dinner. Aiden fell asleep. Adam got up from the rug he’d claimed and sat next to me, his muzzle on my thigh.
She’s not going to let him go easily, he told me.
“I caught that.” I threaded my fingers through his fur. “It’s a good thing that we have the walking stick.” Sometime during the storytelling, the stick had appeared in my lap. “It should show us the way home.”
—
There was, I noticed, a faint green light that danced in the runes etched on the silver of the head of the walking stick. Aiden turned and, when I followed, the glow faded. I stopped and moved the walking stick in the direction we’d been headed. The green glow returned.
It wasn’t the way the walking stick had shown me how to get home last time, but it was clearly unhappy about following Aiden.
“Wrong way,” I said. “Home is this way.”
“Right,” said Aiden. “But we have to go around until we can find a way down.”
Down?
I leaned the walking stick against Adam’s shoulder, unwilling to merely set it on the ground—or hand it to Aiden, though I wasn’t sure why. When I did, I saw that the others had been climbing up a steep mountain—though the whole time I’d been walking on a flat cave floor. The direction the walking stick wanted us to go appeared to be an impassable cliff face.
“I see,” I said. “Come here and give me your t-shirt.”
Aiden’s expression was a little wary, but he pulled his t-shirt off and handed it to me. I blindfolded him and, taking up the staff again, walked him through a tree root I’d seen when I wasn’t holding the staff.
“Okay,” I said. “That worked.”
I turned him around and had him walk the same path. He stumbled over the root—I caught him before he fell. He reached up to take off his blindfold, and I tapped his hand. “Leave it for a minute. Trust me.”
“You just made me trip,” he said.
“You didn’t get hurt,” I told him.
Adam posed a different problem. I wasn’t going to blindfold him. Not when something had been following us. We needed Adam free to act.
“Close your eyes and lean on me?” I asked. He did. And I took him over the same root—and he picked his feet up and stepped over the root because he paid attention to his environment.
But he followed me right off the cliff. Or where he thought the cliff would be, anyway.
With Adam leaning against me, I took Aiden by the arm, held the staff in my free hand, and took them in the direction the staff dictated.
“The ground feels hard,” Aiden said after a few minutes.
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t think too hard about it. Just walk.”
It wasn’t that the cavern floor was flat. Finding a path where the three of us could walk abreast wasn’t always practical. Once, traveling on a worn wooden bridge over a river, I had to leave one of them behind and escort them across one at a time. But mostly I could push Aiden ahead of me and keep Adam against my side as the green light in the walking stick got brighter and brighter.
We stopped to eat . . . lunch? Dinner? I couldn’t tell. We just needed food. Before I took off Aiden’s blindfold, I cautiously released my hold on the walking stick, leaving it balanced for a moment on its own. In the time it took for the stick to fall back into my hand, the light dimmed, and we appeared to be in a rocky ravine. But no one was standing in midair or anything.
“Okay,” I said. “You can take your blindfold off.”
Adam stepped away from me and shook himself.
Aiden and I had meal preparation down pat. I’d open the bag of freeze-dried food and fill it with water, and he’d heat it up—no fire needed. The first three bags went to Adam, who needed a lot of calories. When I’d eaten as much of my food as I could, I opened up the packet and held it down for Adam to finish off. But Adam was standing alert, taking in deep breaths of air.
I stood up and gripped my walking stick and sucked in air to see if I could catch the scent that had alerted Adam.
“What is it?” asked Aiden.
“Fae,” I said, only that moment certain.
He frowned at me. “Which fae?”
“I think she means us,” said the Widow Queen, appearing out of thin air. She was accompanied by three others, two men and a woman. None of them were familiar to me except for the Widow Queen. All of them wore armor, though not the kind of armor I’d have expected. Theirs was the sort that soldiers or police might wear, except for the colors. Most police SWAT teams wore black or blue, not silver, gold, green, or, in the Widow Queen’s case, lavender. Kevlar, I thought, didn’t have any cold-iron components. These fae were traditional enough that they carried swords strapped to their hips or over their shoulders. I didn’t see any guns.
“Good afternoon, Aiden,” the Widow Queen said. “Have you retrieved it yet?”
He stared at her mutely. I could scent his fear.
“Retrieved what?” I asked, stepping closer to him.
“The artifact, child,” she said to me. “The artifact.”
I put a hand on Aiden’s shoulder. “Are you here as a representative of the Gray Lords, to receive the artifact in fulfillment of our bargain?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that, but it was best to get everyone’s cards on the table to avoid a misunderstanding.
Fire Touched Page 29
