And if he couldn’t get her to the safe house, she’d never have the chance to.
“Just a little further,” he coaxed.
“Steven, I can’t!”
He wasn’t called Steven, not really, but a name was a name, and he knew the souls felt better when they had something to call him. It didn’t make any difference to him.
“You’re nearly there,” he urged. “Come on, run. You can, I promise you.”
Her only response was to sob.
The ferryman gritted his teeth. He liked this one, and he wanted her to make it. She deserved it. It was his fault, he knew. He’d gone too easy on her this morning, letting her take extra breaks and going at a slower pace to help her get used to the landscape, to walking without the crutches she’d leaned on all her life.
She wouldn’t pay for his mistakes.
“All right, hold on.”
Letting go of her hand, he grabbed her arm and lifted it, then he bent down and tucked himself into her side. When he stood up, he had her over his shoulder. Her weight centred, he started to run.
It wasn’t easy. She was light, but it was cumbersome carrying her. She blocked his sight on the left-hand side, and keeping her balanced required both his hands. The sun was moments from setting, and the chorus of hissing and snarling that seemed to echo all around them in this basin nestled between hills told him the wraiths were ready. Waiting.
Still, the safe house wasn’t far away. Just across this short length of boggy marshland, on the first section of high ground, a low platform at the base of the next hill. The mud sucked and pulled at his feet with every step, but he maintained a steady jog. Almost there.
The sun dropped down out of sight.
There was very little difference in light, but the whistling and shrieking escalated as the wraiths were set free. Daring a glance about, the ferryman saw them barrelling down towards him on all sides. Some were smarter, hovering around the safe house that he could clearly see now. It was so close.
So. Close.
He put on an extra burst of speed, though he knew he wouldn’t make it before the first of the wraiths reached him. He’d have to fight – but that was OK. The ferryman was a match for the wraiths, for a little while, at least.
“What are those things?” Anna, the soul, had obviously spotted the wraiths, because she went rigid over his shoulder. The sudden change threw him off balance and he almost fell, catching himself at the last second before he tumbled them both into the muck.
“It’s all right,” he soothed, gripping her more tightly.
His words didn’t help. She started shifting and twisting, probably trying to see the creatures racing towards her. He didn’t blame her, they were terrifying to behold.
“Steven, what are they?”
“Wraiths,” he panted.
The safe house was close, but the wraiths were closer. Deciding he’d bought them as much advantage as he could, Steven dropped Anna back down into the marshland. Her feet disappeared into the mud with a squelch.
“You’ll be safe in there,” he told her, pointing. “Run!”
Anna froze, likely disoriented from bouncing about upside down, but they didn’t have time for her confusion. The ferryman grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her to face the right direction, and shoved.
“Go! Run!”
Anna ran. It was ungainly and stumbling, like a foal first finding its feet, but as Steven followed close on her heels, tearing away any wraiths that got too close, slinging them to the side so they’d spin and crash into the water, he felt a surge of triumph.
They were going to make it.
A wraith decided to change tactics, go for him instead. It gouged his arm, but he ignored the pain, flinging it away and batting at another that sought his eyes, to blind him.
“Just keep running,” he hollered to Anna. She was less than a couple of metres in front of him, but with the cacophony coming from the wraiths, he worried she might not hear him. “Go straight through the door.”
It stood waiting for them, already ajar. All Anna would have to do was barrel right through it and cross the threshold into safety. The remaining wraiths would have an opportunity to tear into the ferryman, but he’d heal by morning. It was nothing unusual.
The ground firmed up beneath their feet. Boggy marsh gave way to grass, then cracked and uneven paving stones. Anna’s feet pounded on the path, her hands reaching up to shove at the door. The ferryman smiled, relief coursing through him.
Then the muted greens and browns of Anna’s wasteland flickered and stuttered, flashing red for a heartbeat before bouncing back, then red again. At the same time, the ground bucked beneath the ferryman, sent him skidding across the floor, pebbles ripping into his palms.
Undeterred, he lifted his head to see Anna run through the door – and to see the wraiths follow her right on inside.
That was impossible.
Shocked, he stilled, sprawled on his front on the ground. A handful of wraiths immediately descended on him, clawing and hissing as their teeth sunk into his flesh. The ferryman paid them no heed, unaware of anything except the blood-curdling sounds of Anna’s screams.
As the world began to fade to white around him, he closed his eyes. He didn’t understand it, but there was something very wrong in the wasteland.
CHAPTER 7
“I think we have a problem.”
“What?” Dylan looked up at Tristan from the styrofoam container of cottage pie that she was just about to tuck into.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a wraith.”
“What?” Her plastic fork dropped into her lunch, spattering gravy onto her school shirt. She didn’t notice.
“The thing that killed the horse.”
“What?” Click, click, click, the pieces slotted into place as she finally caught up with the conversation.
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
Dylan leaned forward and scowled at him as he dropped into the seat opposite her.
“What do you mean, you think it’s a wraith? It happened miles away from the tears Jack and I made. It can’t be a wraith!” Dylan’s voice came out sharp and shrill. Wincing, she looked around the crowded cafeteria, but no one was paying her any attention. “Why do you think it’s… one of them?”
Tristan took a deep breath. “There’s been another attack, at the same place.”
“A person?”
“No, sheep.”
“A sheep?”
Tristan shook his head. “Not one, a whole herd of them. At the next farm over, just last night. It was on the BBC regional news page. The police are warning people about a possible dangerous wild animal.”
“A wild animal? This isn’t Africa – there aren’t lions and tigers wandering about!”
“The news suggested it might have escaped from somewhere, like a zoo or a private collection.”
“There is a safari park somewhere around there,” Dylan agreed. She considered Tristan. “But you don’t think that’s what it is.”
“No.”
“I just…” Dylan shoved her lunch tray away, her appetite gone. She felt sick now. Though she wasn’t convinced, Tristan’s worry was palpable and hard to ignore. “I don’t see how it can be a wraith. There, in the middle of nowhere. You definitely haven’t felt another ferryman coming through?”
Tristan shook his head with strained patience – Dylan had asked him this before.
“Then it makes sense for it to just be something normal. Well, as normal as a panther stalking around Central Scotland! It does, Tristan!” she repeated. “How else would a wraith get here? They can’t just come through, not on their own.”
He didn’t look convinced. “I know, but I feel it… Something’s not right.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t sense a wraith until they were really close?”
“I can’t. Not—”
“Not without Susanna,” Dylan finished, when Tristan wisely didn’t. She heaved out a breath. She knew where
this was going. “You want to go out there. Investigate.”
He nodded, shrugging apologetically.
Dylan pursed her lips but gave in. If Tristan was right – and she didn’t see how he could be – then their deal with the Inquisitor demanded they go and deal with it. Kill the wraith, work out where the hell it came from and stop any others from coming through.
If Tristan was right, and they didn’t go and check it out and the Inquisitor stepped in…
“All right,” she said, sighing. “Tomorrow’s Friday so it’s a half day. We can go then. Will that do?”
Tristan made a face, likely chafed by the delay, but jerked his head once in a nod.
“Tomorrow,” he agreed.
“You’ll see,” she said, picking her fork up and forcing herself to scoop up a mouthful, “we won’t find anything.”
She said it with confidence, and hoped that she was right.
* * *
“I still think this is daft,” Dylan griped. She stood shin-deep in mud, her feet freezing in her wellies. She was pretty sure one of her socks was about to slide off as well. In her left hand she gripped an umbrella, big fat raindrops pelting down and creating an uneven drumbeat around her head. She’d pulled her other arm out of the sleeve of her waterproof entirely and had it wrapped around her stomach, numb, frozen fingers tingling against her skin. And every time she exhaled, her breath steamed before her.
March in Scotland was neither the time nor the place to be traipsing round the countryside. To be honest, Dylan really didn’t think there was ever a time to do that. She hadn’t been an ‘outdoorsy’ girl before she’d died, and her experiences in the wasteland – and beyond – had done nothing to change that.
Tristan ignored her. She supposed he’d given up trying to placate her after the first five attempts failed to make an impact. Instead, he was peering into the next field, fingers tense around the top string of a barbed-wire fence. Dylan stood a good few metres back from him because, well… beyond was a grim sight.
Really, really grim.
It was like something out of a slasher movie. Countless bodies had been piled one atop the other, limbs contorted at odd angles, more flesh than skin on display. They’d been burned, and the fire still wasn’t quite out, the heat creating a swirling mist that rose and coiled like a departing ghost.
The fact that the bodies were those of sheep and not people did little to detract from the horror.
“Tristan, honestly, I don’t see—”
“I want to get closer,” Tristan interrupted her.
“What?”
Rather than answering, he swung his leg over the fence and dropped down into the field with the smouldering heap of carcases.
“Tristan!” Dylan hurried forwards, squelching through the mud-mire, but she couldn’t go any further than the barrier between fields – and that wasn’t just because there was no way she’d be able to get over it in her size-too-big wellies. This close, she could see much more detail, her gaze more easily penetrating the smoke, but also, the smell that had been merely uncomfortable in her previous spot was now close to overwhelming. Dylan gagged, wriggling her hand up through the neck of her jacket to cover her face. She breathed through her mouth rather than her nose, but that just meant she could taste it. Soot and burned wool and, underneath, the more familiar flavours of lamb, of mutton.
She liked lamb, normally. After this, she thought she might never eat it again.
In front of her, Tristan seemed unperturbed by the stink, or at least determined enough to ignore it. He was right up at the mound, close enough to touch. As Dylan watched he reached out, as if he was actually going to stick his hand into the huge pile of grossness, but he held back, his hand hovering over what, from Dylan’s viewpoint, looked like a charred hoof.
She didn’t see why they were here. They had closed both holes through to the wasteland; there was no way for wraiths to get through.
And even if one had, what would it be doing here, far from either of the two sites: the tunnel where she’d died and the alleyway where Jack’s life had trickled out through a stab wound in his stomach? And this time it wasn’t even people who had died – it was sheep! A lot of sheep, and she admitted that it was odd… but surely it couldn’t have anything to do with her or Tristan?
“Tristan!” she called. “It’s getting late and it’s going to be dark soon.”
“All right,” Tristan replied, tucking his phone back into his pocket after taking several snaps. “I’m done.” He jogged back to her, typically having no difficulty with the deep, sucking mud.
“What do you think?” Dylan asked. Despite her own scepticism, she knew she was no expert. Tristan was.
He grimaced, glancing back at the burned bodies of an entire flock. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, the bodies are scratched and torn just like I’d expect to see in a wraith attack but…”
“But it’s sheep,” Dylan finished.
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t it more likely that it was just an out-of-control pack of dogs?” That was what the angry farmer had blamed when he was interviewed on the news, his eyes red-rimmed beneath his weathered bunnet. “Or a wild animal, like the police said?”
“It could have been,” Tristan mused.
“I mean,” Dylan went on, “we’re not even near either of the two breaches. Any wraith that came through would have had to have passed dozens of places with tasty humans in them before it got here.”
“Tasty humans?” Tristan quirked an eyebrow.
“You know what I mean!” Dylan rolled her eyes and nudged him with her shoulder.
“You’re right,” Tristan agreed. “It’s probably nothing. I just…” He looked back once more at the pile of carcasses, a long, lingering look this time. “I just have a funny feeling that something’s not right.”
“Can you sense a wraith?” Dylan asked. Despite her misgivings, Tristan’s gut feeling and the low chill now invading her own stomach told her she was beginning to take the possibility of a breach a little more seriously.
“Not really,” Tristan wrinkled his nose. “I mean, I don’t think so. Without Susanna here it’s a bit harder to—”
He bit his words off and Dylan clenched her teeth. Susanna, again. She’d be much more helpful than Dylan was in this situation, and didn’t that just rub her up the wrong way.
“Right,” Dylan said, more sharply than she’d intended.
Trying to pretend the sheep weren’t there, Dylan perused the landscape. They were just a couple of miles outside Kilsyth and the land was all neatly divided into fields. Some, like the one they were in, were grassed over, clearly used for grazing. Others were nothing more than furrowed brown earth, turned to bog after all the recent heavy rain. Up on a hill, about a mile away, Dylan could see a large house surrounded by a cluster of outbuildings and a barn, probably the farm that owned these fields. She hoped whoever lived up there wasn’t in; she didn’t want an angry farmer descending on them, shotgun in hand.
Lower down the same hill, on the narrow country road that led out towards the main route back into town, was a row of neat little cottages that probably at one time belonged to farm laborers. The high hedges were hopefully working to keep Tristan and Dylan hidden from the houses, but still, Dylan felt exposed and vulnerable. Irrationally, she was more concerned about being caught here and shouted at than she was about a wraith springing from the hedgerow and trying to punch a hole through her.
“Priorities, Dylan,” she muttered to herself.
“What?” Tristan asked. He, too, was gazing at the landscape, but Dylan doubted angry locals were on his mind.
“Nothing,” she said. She made herself focus. “Do you know what field the horse was in?”
“No.” Tristan shook his head. “The news report only said it was less than a mile from the sheep attack, and we can see more than a mile in either direction from here, I reckon, so it must have been really close by.”
“OK.” Dylan turned s
lowly on the spot. There wasn’t much to see. “Apart from the houses, I don’t see many hiding places.”
“If the wraith had found its way into the houses, it would have been a much bigger story,” Tristan said.
Well, it was hard to argue with that. Unexplained dead bodies did tend to cause a splash. A fleeting image of the house in Denny, the one where they’d found the nest of wraiths, flashed in her mind. She still had nightmares about the brief glimpses she’d caught of those blood-soaked walls.
“So, what do we do?” she asked.
“Hunt for the wraith,” Tristan said simply. “Although…” His forehead scrunched up in a frown. “It would be better if we could find where it got through.”
“If one got through,” Dylan amended, not willing to give up on the possibility that there was no wraith quite yet.
“Right,” Tristan said distractedly, his gaze on the landscape.
“How do we do that?” Dylan asked. “We won’t be able to see it, will we?”
“Not unless we’re close enough to fall in it,” Tristan answered wryly. “And I’d prefer that not to happen. If a soul ripped a hole, the other side of the veil should look just like this. It’d be like trying to spot a mirror with no edges, nearly impossible to see. It’s almost a shame you can’t feel it pulling at you, like in the tunnel. It would make our lives a lot easier.”
“Well, I’m not sad about that,” Dylan said. The feeling in her chest in the tunnel when they’d revisited the spot where she’d died had terrified her. It had been like something reached inside her, grabbed her heart… and yanked.
“No, I’m not either.” Tristan reached out and squeezed her hand in silent apology. He took a deep breath. “Look, let’s just concentrate on trying to find out for certain whether there is a wraith or not. If we find one, well, then we’ll worry about where it came from.”
“OK, that sounds like a plan.” Dylan turned slowly in a circle and then stopped. “You’re thinking over there, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
Outcasts Page 5
