Simone’s mane streamed behind her, sparks dancing in the black and purple locks. The feathers in her halter lit from within and shone like jewels. She tightened her grip on my hand and pulled.
A heartbeat later, we stumbled into the In-Between, tripping over our feet and going down in a heap on an oil-slicked street, broken concrete laced with ribbons of asphalt that’d been used for repair but had instead spread and melted into the cracks. I choked on my first breath of warm air. The rotten egg taste of it made me want to take my oxygen in shallow gasps.
The gloaming had followed us here, or existed here on its own time. Time in this realm did its own thing, depending on which realm the scenery had been pulled from. Frogs sang close by, a rhythmic undercurrent in the hush of the night. The full moon hung low in the sky. It seemed bigger than a moon had a right to be. Old, twisted oaks lined the street, nothing behind them. Not a blade of grass or a bush or a building. No animal moved over there. As if we’d traveled to the very edge of the In-Between. It ended abruptly, right there.
The trees cast shadows on the road, their branches becoming gnarled fingers, their leaves like writhing animals. I glanced up and caught a glimpse of ruffled black feathers from the corner of my eye. A crow. A new one, native to the In-Between? Or had the same one followed us through from Faery? One crow was like any other, at least as far as they dealt with me. They all seemed to share the same razor-sharp mind.
It perched on a wavering branch. It looked back at me, meeting my gaze. The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention.
The wind gusted. It smelled like a musty den filled with dead things. Dreams extinguished. Bones cracked and sucked for their marrow. I pushed to my feet, knees cracking, my wounded shoulder pierced with a cold ache that I felt inside my teeth.
Leaves floated down from the trees. One of them landed in my hair.
Don’t panic, I heard.
Making my heart thunder in my chest again at the prospect of more mortal danger.
I listened harder. I didn’t hear any other thoughts. No, I didn’t hear any other human thoughts. The crow had spoken to me. I caught the nuances of its words now, my heart slowing again. The metallic edge to every syllable, the way my tongue curled at the taste of them. The other-than-human intelligence of them.
I thought at the crow. Who’s here?
You, it said. And a Horseman.
A horseman. What did that mean? A cowboy? A headless horseman?
Of the End, the crow said.
End with a capital E. I only knew one kind of end that qualified. Horsemen of the Apocalypse aren’t real. They’re myths. Biblical myths, but still not real.
Like faeries? the crow asked.
“Shit,” I said out loud.
From her spot on the ground, Simone glanced up. “Trouble?”
I nodded, and turned my attention back to the bird, my mind turning. Which questions to ask? We’d just averted a freakin’ apocalypse in September. The Demon and his disease in the Human world. And then there was the current problem in Faery. It wasn’t fair to have to deal with another End so soon.
I could hear Rude’s voice in my head—not a manifestation of danger, just the manifestation of a wise-ass. Dude, he would’ve said. No rest for the wicked or the weary.
I flashed the crow a half-smile. Which Horseman?
Famine, it said.
Interesting. I’d have banked on War. Or Death. But Famine? What did that mean? Had I run into this Horseman before and just not known it?
Have I met him already? I asked.
The crow titled its head. Her. You haven’t met her.
Curious emphasis on the “you.” Does my friend know her?
Not the friend beside you.
So, not Simone. One of the others. Since none of my other friends had mentioned the Horseman, I laid odds on it being the most closed-mouthed. Malek?
The crow cawed a yes and took off, the branch it’d perched on bobbing like a spring.
“Snake strikes again,” I said.
“I can’t read your mind, so you’re gonna have to explain that to me,” Simone said. “After we get under cover.”
I spun on my heel and took in the opposite side of the road. A row of squat, windowless, red brick buildings lined the concrete. Their corrugated tin roofs didn’t sit right, as if a construction crane or a movie monster had picked them up to look underneath and set them back down willy-nilly. The buildings stretched as far as I could see to my left. To the right, there were maybe five before the road dead-ended, one last building marking that spot.
None of the buildings looked occupied, but looks could, of course, deceive.
“Which one?” I asked.
“Not the one at the end.” She rose, slow and steady, brushing her palms on the back of her scuffed leather pants.
“Gut feeling?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Too obvious.”
If someone came looking for us, she meant. I pointed at the one two doors down.
“Yeah.” She started that direction, her limp a lot more pronounced than it’d been in Faery.
I gave her my good arm to lean on. She took it without argument.
Our shoes whispered on the concrete. Our shadows stumbled ahead of us. Our breathing sounded unnaturally loud to me. Anyone hunting us, if they couldn’t see, would surely be able to hear. Could they smell us over and above the sulfur in the air? The days’-old dirt and the blood and the exhaustion?
I should’ve asked the crow whether Famine had noticed us. Whether she had eyes on us now. I should’ve asked the crow to tell me everything he knew about her. Instead, I’d—what?—gotten us a different kind of clue.
The door to the building was made from unpainted pine, and the knob took a little elbow grease to turn. The hinges squealed. Moonlight flooded the entry, lighting a path across the smooth, empty concrete floor.
My human eyes couldn’t make out anything else. Simone could see better than a cat in the dark, though.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing to worry about.”
I closed the door behind us. It had a deadbolt. I used it.
I heard the flutter of Simone’s wings as she moved across the room, followed by a click. A wan halo of light lit her chin and the point of her nose. It took me a second to realize she was holding a flashlight, and that she was holding it like a kid at a slumber party telling ghost stories, the light perfectly positioned to scare the crap out of everyone.
“Batteries are dying,” she said, smacking the flashlight’s head. “It loses a little something.”
“Can you boost ’em?” I asked.
“If I wasn’t hurt.” She swung the faded beam of light in an arc, revealing a mound of packing blankets in the far corner, a red metal mechanic’s cabinet pushed against the wall, and a long, flat stone with two inches’ worth of candle wax in the center.
I pulled a tin of matches from my backpack and lit the two visible wicks. They sparked immediately, flames stretching tall, blue and smoky. The light wavered and then steadied, giving me a moment’s ease. A little room to breathe.
I yanked one of the moving blankets from the top of the stack and set it beside Simone, close to the wall in case she needed to lean against it.
There were white smears on the floor. Tracked-in dirt? No. Chalk. Like the stuff in our packs. We used it to draw spells.
I pried the candle stone off the floor and raised it to shoulder-level, casting an unsteady glow on the floor. Lines and symbols that had been carefully drawn, then destroyed.
“What do you think?” I asked.
Simone followed the remains of the drawings. “Looks like an aborted protection spell. Elaborate. A faery working, not a human’s. It’s not a threat.”
“But there was one,” I said. “Or whoever made it in the first place wouldn’t have.”
She nodded.
There wasn’t anything we could do about it now, if anything needed to be done at all. We had plenty of pr
oblems already. First among them, Simone wobbled on her feet. She’d fall down if she didn’t sit down.
I pointed at the blanket.
She didn’t argue, just knelt on the blanket, thinning her lips on the way down. “It’s just a couple of cuts.”
Which, now that we were somewhere maybe safer, planted a hundred questions in my mind. I set down the knife I’d taken from the girl and rummaged in my pack for the first aid kit.
“A couple of cuts that made you pass out,” I said. “The girl do something to you? Was the blade poisoned? Is it still?”
“No,” Simone said. “It was pure iron.”
I paused. I hadn’t noticed. To me, it had been just a knife. But then, I was human.
A pure iron blade, mythically anathema to the fae. I’d never seen a fae deterred by the presence of iron, but myths usually had a foundation, a reason behind them, a trace of fact in ancient history that lived on in story and blood. Legend had it that the fae once lived amongst humans, that we’d inhabited the same world. The extraction of iron ore from the earth changed all that somehow. The fae left. Humans remembered them for a while, but as the centuries passed, so many humans forgot.
The fae did not. It was hard for them to love humans after that, and their morality often bore little resemblance to our own. That made them seem cold, calculating, uncaring. I’d thought exactly that at first, but knowing Simone—and having had my own emotional experience of turning fae during the fight against the Demon—I couldn’t really believe that anymore.
A pure iron blade carried by a faery girl—it would’ve been painful to wield. In fact, the girl shouldn’t have been able to hold it at all, much less use it. Maybe the yew handle had helped shield the girl. For the iron blade to have truly harmed Simone, it had to have left shards in her skin, or sent iron particles flowing into her bloodstream.
“How bad does it hurt?”
“Worse than it should,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“I think the blade was blessed.”
“Like, by a priest?”
“No priest’s blessing—or curse—could hurt me or any other fae being,” she said. “Only a prayer uttered from the lips of a loved one.”
I wrapped my fingers around the square kit and pulled it out. “How many loved ones do you have?”
She studied her knees.
“Well,” I said, “it wasn’t me.”
“Then it was my father.”
Her father was the counselor at the school I was supposed to be attending. Mr. Nance, no first name. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a fondness for pinstriped suits and ties, and wore tie-up dress shoes that always sported a mirror shine. An oil painting of The Wild Hunt hung behind the battered particle-board desk in his school office, the colors extra lurid under the fluorescent lights. His bookshelves held an ivy so old, the trailers could probably wrap around the earth twice. He loved Simone, and he’d lost her when the Faery King took her for his own.
She’d tried to tell Nance in no uncertain terms that she was never coming back. She’d never be what he wanted her to be, not ever again. How could she? Every trace of her humanity had been consumed, or at least most of it. If she held on to any of it, she did so by sheer indomitable will.
Her father loved her. He would never have done something to hurt her. Would he?
Desperation made people do really stupid things. And as much as he wanted us—including Simone—to believe he’d accepted what she’d become, we all knew that was bullshit.
Anger surged in my blood. I tried to keep my voice even. This was her dad we were talking about. “Why would you father want you dead?”
“I can’t think of a single reason,” she said.
But there had to be one. “Did the blessing on the blade harm you? Permanently, I mean? Is there something in the first aid kit that will help? Or an incantation or spell?”
She shook her head. “I’m gonna need to sleep. Once I nod off, it might be hard to wake me up for a while.”
Not great. Not in the mess we were in. “How long?”
“Twenty-four hours?”
“You’re guessing.”
“It’s not like this has ever happened to me before.” She shook her head again, shaking it off, changing the subject. “What’s going on, Kev? What did the crow say?”
“There’s a girl-shaped Horseman of the Apocalypse in the In-Between, someplace nearby. Her name is Famine.”
Simone whistled.
“You know her?”
“Heard of her,” she said.
“What’ve you heard?”
“She’s playing a long game,” Simone said. “She’s showing up in places she shouldn’t be able to. I mean, if you go by the rules, which are that the Horsemen aren’t supposed to be active until the big daddy apocalypse.”
“As opposed to the ones that are no big deal?” I asked.
“You know what I mean, smart-ass. I don’t know why or how she’s able to show up like she has. Here, according to the crow, but also in at least two hells that I’m aware of.”
“There’s more than one of those?”
Simone sighed. “There’s a lot. Places where souls can become trapped after the people they belonged to die, or where live people can get stuck going through the same pattern over and over again, trying to work out their sins. Or what they think of as sins.”
I blinked at her. “How come I’ve never heard of that?”
“You’re new to this whole thing, Kev.” She stretched her arms wide.
“I’ve been at it almost two years.”
“Like I said. New.”
Whatever. “So I don’t know everything. Yet.”
“I have no idea why Famine would be here in the In Between, but I don’t like the timing,” Simone said. “It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Can’t it? I’ve never heard of her before today. What are the odds she’s heard of me?”
“Famine might be connected to that girl who cut us. Or to my father.”
“Crazy talk,” I said. Mr. Nance would definitely not have anything to do with a Horseman.
“Either way,” Simone said. “We’ve gotta know for sure.”
Which brought me around to the other thing the crow said. “Malek knows her. Or he’s met her.”
“The snake,” she said.
Malek had been one of those at the beginning of time. The most famous snake ever, in fact. He’d been the serpent from the Garden of Eden, the Tempter. Talk about your Biblical myths made real. Now he looked human, but he was immortal. Someone more powerful than him—there was a frightening thought—had taken away his seductive voice, so he had to sign his words or write them down. His magic lived in his blood. It was poisonous to humans. It also had fabled healing powers, so people sometimes tried to take it from him. Knocked him out and tried to take it by force. Or tried to steal it by trickery. Every single one of them had died screaming.
With Malek, it was always about blood.
He owned a place on Westheimer Road called Snake Bite Tattoo. He had a very select clientele: the desperate. They needed him more than they needed life itself, and he obliged by adding drops of his blood to his inks, using them to create tattoos that writhed under the skin until they set. No, adding blood didn’t exactly jibe with governmental regulations. Then again, Malek didn’t obey any kind of government.
That thought led me to wonder whether the government had a clue about Malek. They couldn’t possibly have missed the way the Demon had Gothamed the fourth largest city in the country. But they hadn’t stepped in. They hadn’t so much as sent someone to investigate. Least not anyone I knew about.
That was another problem for another day. And I challenged any FBI agent to deal with Malek. Conventional weapons versus ancient magic? Would there even be a contest?
Malek was scary, but he wasn’t all bad. His spells brought mothers and fathers news of their kidnapped children, dead or alive. He gave powers to certain people, and took
them away from others. His spells had doomed—and saved—the entire city. The people he worked on paid with their fortunes, their fates, or their lives.
He’d never been human. His idea of ethics bore no resemblance to anything human. His notions of right and wrong were absolute. People who made bargains with him kept them to the letter of what they’d agreed, or they died. He did not forgive.
Malek was the villain of every story—or he should be—except in the fight to save the world, he’d come down on the side of good.
I didn’t understand him, but I trusted him to be who he was, to do what he said.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my fingers. I could feel the stain of dried blood on them, and the dirt and blood underneath my fingernails. “We need to know what he knows.”
She mulled that over. “We can’t go to him. It might’ve been possible yesterday. Before the girl with the blessed iron.”
The girl whose blade could’ve killed Simone. The girl who had been hunting me. “You’re afraid that her friends will follow us.”
“Or that my father will have one of them, or someone else, waiting for us to enter the human realm, especially at any of the familiar places.”
We’d be attacked as we stepped into that world, off balance and vulnerable. I tried to picture Mr. Nance ordering something like that, or learning the news that we’d been killed. I just couldn’t.
“I don’t want to believe it’s him,” I said.
“I don’t either,” she said. “But we can’t take that chance.”
I nodded. “So we get a message to Malek. Bring the snake to us.”
“If he’ll come.”
Right. Because he was effectively a god, and gods didn’t come running when humans called. We weren’t just anybody, though.
I walked over to the door and unlocked it. I took a deep breath and pulled it open in a rush, bracing myself, half expecting a Horsewoman to fill the threshold. But nothing and nobody stood in the doorway. There was only moonlight and frog song and the catch of wings on the gusting wind.
I whistled softly.
A crow cawed back. Might’ve been the same one I’d spoken to in the tree across the road. I couldn’t see it in the dark, not even its eyes.
Faery (The Faery Chronicles Book 3) Page 3
