But nothing happened.
“He’s shivering, Fetch! Quick! Let’s get him into the car!”
“I will carry him.”
I shook, not only from the cold, but from Fetch evidently lifting me. I wanted to warn him to be careful that no one saw him, but couldn’t form the words.
I must’ve passed out. The next thing I knew I was bouncing lightly in what I had to assume was Claryce’s Wills. The cold had begun to recede, for which I was grateful. It hadn’t been due to the dragon, though, but rather a slightly musty furred form lying against me.
“How is he?”
“Still not ducky, Mistress Claryce, but better. I think he’s trying to wake up.”
“Try to rest, Nick,” she called. “Don’t fight it.”
“Gate . . .” I blurted.
“What’s he saying, Fetch?”
“I think he believes he’s still near the Gate. He does not know.”
“We’ll explain later, Nick,” she answered me. “Just rest.”
I didn’t argue with her. I couldn’t have even if I wanted to.
I vaguely remembered bouncing around a couple of times. I also recalled feeling cold briefly, but then becoming comfortably warm.
I slept . . . and so, naturally, I dreamed.
Once more, I rode my horse into battle against the dragon. In the distance, I saw Cleolinda standing behind him, her wrists manacled. This time, though, she was dressed in clothes more current to the times of the Columbian Exposition.
The dragon was sleeping when first I started riding toward him, but now he raised his head toward me. He opened his huge jaws . . . and his head became that of Kravayik.
“I am so sorry, Master Nicholas!” he roared.
My mount reared. I brought the spear up.
“Nick.”
The dream faded. I used the voice to help me fight to consciousness.
Claryce’s face came into view. I focused on it as best I could.
“Oh, Nick!” She leaned down and kissed me. It was as much a kiss of relief as anything, but it was just what I needed to keep awake.
“What . . . how did you find me?” I asked when she pulled back.
“Fetch called me.”
“On the telephone?”
“Yes.” She smiled at the thought. “I haven’t had a chance to ask him how he managed that.”
“I’m amazed he was able to drag me from Feirie and onto the pier.”
“You weren’t at the pier, Nick. You weren’t anywhere near the lakefront.”
“What’s that mean?” I very distinctly recalled hitting the ground. I searched inside for the dragon and just barely felt his presence. It was surprising we were in as good a shape as we were. It was a surprise we were in any shape at all.
“First . . . if you ever go into Feirie again without me you’ll wish it was Her Lady all you had to worry about. Don’t ever do that. Understand me?” After I dutifully nodded—but didn’t promise—she went on. “Fetch told me about how the encounter with her started and that damned trick she played on you.”
“We were prepared for something to happen.”
“You mean you and—him?” Claryce pointed at my head. “The two of you didn’t do so well.”
Inside, the dragon snarled halfheartedly.
“Second, from what Fetch told me, after you rose into the sky, you began to transform. Something went wrong, though. You started to fall while you were still trying to change. And then . . . and then . . . what Fetch said. It looked like the Gate opened up in reverse around you just as you hit the ground.”
Despite the pain still coursing through me, that last comment pushed me to a sitting position. “Looked like what?”
“You heard me. He couldn’t explain it any better save that it also seemed more like a shadow, maybe. He can explain later. He’s gone after Kravayik. Fetch said that Kravayik owes you.”
I didn’t argue that point. “So, where did I end up?”
“West Sixty-Third Street. Near where Bond—sorry, Holmes—built that monstrosity.”
“You’re joking. There again?”
“Wish I was.” She moved away from me. “Think you can eat something?”
I couldn’t tell if it was my stomach that grumbled just then or the dragon stirring to life. Either way, I nodded. “Thanks.”
“Just rest while I get you a sandwich and some soup. Oh, while you were asleep, I imposed on an old friend of mine in order to get the Packard back here. I didn’t think you wanted to call Barnaby about it.”
“No, you’re right. Thanks. You’ve done more than enough. More than you should’ve.”
“I did what had to be done, Nick. Now rest more. I’ll be back shortly.”
I laid back down on what I finally realized was her bed. The soft cotton sheets threatened to send me back to dreamland, but I tried to stay awake so that I could analyze all that’d happened. I knew that Holmes was near to completing his spell, but what worried me as much was the mere fact that he’d had some control over us at the time.
My head cleared enough that I finally figured out how. The prick I’d felt on my throat. Small wonder the daggers had that hollow point. It’d been used to draw blood or something else from me. That’d given Holmes the ability to reach out and attack the dragon and me.
But there had to be more to it than that. If he’d simply wanted to destroy us, there were easier ways than what we’d faced—
Someone whispered from my left, away from the door through which Claryce’d just gone.
When I looked, I saw no one. Still, I couldn’t help feeling like I wasn’t alone.
You never are. . . .
I ignored the dragon’s sarcasm. Pushing myself up, I stared at the tall, glossy waterfall dresser with the rounded edges as if for some reason it would start moving. I couldn’t help feeling that there was something near the dresser that I just wasn’t seeing.
Seeing. I searched for the dragon. He’d receded into the back of my mind again after his remark. I finally understood that it had more to do than just with his own exhaustion. He knew I recognized that, just like Fetch, he’d been able to make use of the Frost Moon’s wake. Unlike Fetch, though, he’d tried to use it to drive me to an unthinking fury strong enough for him to seize permanent control. Now, he was acting like a petulant child.
Acting like I was at fault.
Again, I thought I heard a whisper.
“Let me see,” I murmured.
Eye . . . will let you see . . . he finally answered.
The world turned emerald . . . and revealed nothing.
No. There was movement. A shadow of a shadow. I focused on where I’d seen it.
Just as I needed to blink, I caught sight of a figure. It looked human. I had to stare again, waiting. As before, only when I finally had to blink did I see it ever so briefly.
A man. He wore an outfit outdated by several decades. He also wore a look of immense distress, as if something awful was about to befall him.
And that was it. He was there, and then he wasn’t. I stared at the spot for several seconds, but there was no reappearance.
“Are you all right?”
My eyes shifted to human. Claryce came in carrying a wooden tray with a sandwich and a small bowl from which rose steam and the scent of chicken soup. My stomach rumbled, and I sensed the dragon’s eagerness to have us feed.
“I need to clean up a few things. You just go ahead and eat.”
“What about you?”
“I ate while you were sleeping. It kept me from going crazy waiting for you to wake up, at least for a few minutes.”
I purposely stared at the neatly cut ham and Swiss cheese sandwich. “Sorry about that.”
She sighed. “Eat.”
Alone again, I dug into the sandwich. The first half went down quickly. The soup was boiling hot, but to someone who’d breathed fire, that was fine.
The first spoonful’d barely gone down when I heard more whispers.
The dragon didn�
�t even wait for me to ask. The room emerald once more, I looked at the spot where I’d seen the phantasm, but saw nothing . . . until there was movement at the very edge of my vision.
This time, I didn’t try to track the movement, but rather immediately looked ahead of it where I thought it might go.
A young woman pleaded to the empty air before her, her eyes as wide as the plate the sandwich had come on. She had on a faded brown dress from near the turn of the century.
In the midst of her pleading, she looked directly at me.
It wasn’t just a trick of the angle. She saw me. She pleaded with me now.
And behind her, the man I’d seen earlier looked back at me, too. Although he simply stood there, I could sense the same despair, the same desperation, that filled her.
Then, the rest of them appeared.
I couldn’t say how many. Two dozen. More. More unsettling than even their imploring faces were the murky shades that started to flicker in and out of existence within the gathering. They weren’t exactly ghosts, as I believed these others were, but some essence of other creatures.
Can you not smell them? Can you not smell Feirie upon them?
I couldn’t smell anything from any of my sudden visitors, much less the shades. Still, if they were of Feirie, I could only think that they were the essences of elves, spirits in a different sense than ghosts. Although having no souls, Feirie folk had a sentient magical essence.
A ghost is a ghost is a ghost, the dragon replied with cynicism. We are haunted by ghosts, both human and elven. . . .
He had a point. There was no need differentiating between specters. What was important was why they were suddenly massing around me. There were far more ghosts than I could recall ever coming across in all my centuries. Curiously, most were dressed as if from the past four or five decades—
I nearly spilled the soup as I rose from the bed. No matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t focus on any individual one for more than a breath, but there was always some figure present. Over and over they verified the two things, that they were from the same span of time and were all facing some tremendous horror. Even the murky shadows of the Feirie folk hinted at dismay.
The article we’d found concerning Holmes’s execution had guessed the number of his victims. Sometimes, those kinds of articles bordered on utter conjecture, granting fiends such as the Beast of Chicago a far darker infamy than they deserved.
But this time . . . this time it was clear that only the wildest estimates had come close. What haunted me were Holmes’s victims. All of them, as far as I could see.
I’d never heard of such a mass haunting, and at first I couldn’t see how I’d been sought out by them. Ghosts weren’t supposed to be so independent; Diocles could only materialize in holy places, and generally beyond Saint Michael’s he could only form if I was present. He was bound to me . . . or I was bound to him. Either way, what little I knew of ghosts insisted that they were tied to something concerning their lives or their deaths, but especially the latter—
And that was when I clutched the side of my throat at the spot where I’d been jabbed not once but twice by hollow-tipped daggers. That was when I realized not only just how complex Holmes’s plan was, but the extent of which it’d already progressed.
Each time, those daggers had stolen some of my blood or essence. Maybe both. Either way, Holmes had not only a touch of me, but a touch of the dragon. It’d enabled him to try to draw our power when we’d begun to change. Not believing in coincidence, I suspected that our transformation had been a point where he’d actually been able to affect us . . . and he’d taken that opportunity.
But as I’d discovered in the past, those who dabbled in the use of another’s magic often created a path that stretched both directions. Now that link had brought these ghosts to me, at least momentarily.
I stretched a hand toward the swirling, shifting mass. I didn’t know why. A compulsion that maybe’d originated from them. All I knew was that I desperately needed to reach into their midst—
And suddenly, I was inside the damned maze Holmes’d created. I flew through it, but not so quickly that I didn’t make out visions of figures trapped and tortured all along the way. Most were female. Most were human, but all had suffered at least as much as the elf I’d come across when I’d been trapped. Aware of whom they were, I didn’t have that much sympathy for the Feirie folk, but I saw no reason for their lingering pain either. Holmes’d earned his moniker; he was every bit the Beast in the monstrous sense. If I could’ve, I’d have cast every ghost to the afterlife or oblivion that should’ve come to them, but that wasn’t possible.
Not, at least, while Holmes existed.
Without warning, I was thrust into another chamber deep in the midst of the maze. Without understanding how I knew it—except maybe through some influence of my spectral friends—I recognized the chamber as the focal point to the entire design. All the awful energies drawn from Holmes’s victims gathered here and fed his work.
And fed him.
Small wonder Holmes’d been able to survive hanging and time. He’d succeeded enough in his spellwork to preserve his existence, if not his life. “Survive” hadn’t quite been the right word; he was as dead as anything . . . but he was trying to change that.
“Nick?”
The vision vanished. The ghosts faded away. I stood in Claryce’s bedroom, my hand still stretched toward the wall.
“So,” she remarked rather dryly. “Can I assume something just happened?”
Lowering my hand, I replied, “I think . . . I think I’ve been begged for help . . . and warned that things’re going to get a lot worse.”
“Do they really need to get worse? They’re pretty awful as they are.”
I grunted agreement. “Think on the level of Oberon, only without his grandiose vision of a lovely world made of both our realm and Feirie. Holmes only desires one thing . . . well, maybe two. He’s existing in some sort of half state and wants to become fully alive again.”
“He’s bad enough as he is,” Claryce returned with a shudder. “And the second thing?”
“I’m still not certain about that, only that it involves tremendous power, of course.”
“Oh, of course. There always has to be that. How silly of me to forget.”
I knew she found the situation as humorless as I did. Whatever spellwork the Beast’d begun, it demanded literal sacrifice on an ever-expanding scale.
There was a knock on the apartment door.
“Did you tell Fetch to knock when he came back?”
“No, but I suppose it would make sense.”
“Yeah.” For some reason, I didn’t feel the same. For the first time, something else occurred to me. “My overcoat—”
“Shreds. Apparently it was ripped apart when you changed. I thought you had some spell that made it vanish or something.”
“Or something. It should’ve.” I gestured at my clothes. “Just like these. Either Holmes’s spells or the power of the wake must’ve affected things. Then, the sword . . .”
She quickly shook her head. “Not to worry. Under the bed. I wanted to keep it close for you, but I couldn’t set it next to you.”
“How’d you get it?”
“She handed it back to him after you vanished from Feirie. Apparently without a word but a look that Fetch refuses to describe but indicated unnerved him.”
“I’ll bet.” Her Lady’d probably been stunned by Holmes’s abrupt attack within Feirie. I never could’ve believed it, but I really did think now that it was true. Instead of being the givers of nightmare, the Feirie folk now had a human-spawned nightmare of their own. And worse, Her Lady’d given that nightmare the initial access into the power of her realm.
It served her right, but such justice didn’t help the overall threat to both realms. I quickly snapped the jeweled weapon from underneath the bed, then concentrated inward. This should be an easy one for you. You’ve done it before.
Would
you prefer a prettier style? the dragon mocked. Perhaps something . . . greener?
“Just do it, damn you,” I snarled without thinking.
“Do what? What are you so mad about?”
“Not you—” Before I could explain further, a warmth surrounded me.
“Oh. I see,” Claryce murmured.
A coat identical to the one I’d lost now covered me. He’d even gone overboard and recreated my hat. Of course, this “gift” also included a wave of exhaustion that reminded me of my injuries.
They will heal in a moment. . . . There was no mockery this time. It behooved him to heal our wounds as quickly and efficiently as possible, and the fact that it’d taken this long said a lot as to how much Holmes’s spell’d drained us. That made me consider just how much energy it seemed to be taking not only for him to maintain his in-between state, but how much more he’d need to fully resurrect himself.
“Stay in here,” I warned her. Naturally, she didn’t listen, following me out of the room and heading toward a chair where her purse sat. I decided to wait until she had the Smith & Wesson out and ready. There’d been no more knocking, but I didn’t know what that might mean.
Unfortunately, the apartment had no peephole, so the first thing I did was set my ear to the door. Yeah, that offered any wily figure outside the perfect chance to blow a hole not only in the door, but through me, but I had to take the chance.
The dragon didn’t like my choices. There is only so much Eye can do. . . .
I didn’t answer. Not hearing anything outside, I prepared to open the door. If it’d been some normal visitor, I’d have heard breathing or some other sound. Besides, from Claryce’s earlier reaction, I knew that she hadn’t expected anyone to show up. I didn’t know what she’d finally done with Oliver, but I assumed he hadn’t come to see her for any reason.
There was a slight click behind me. I glanced back to see Claryce with the gun pointed at the door and slightly to my left. I readied Her Lady’s gift. If it turned out to be a normal human visitor, I could use a variation of the spell that made my clients forget me afterward to erase their memory. It was also akin to what I knew the Feir’hr Sein had utilized on Oliver on my behalf.
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