Lost Ones-Veil 3

by Christopher Golden

  “Collette!” Julianna cried happily.

  The two women ran to one another and embraced like long-lost sisters. Oliver stood by during their reunion, until Collette detached herself and turned to look at him with a mischievous grin.

  “You’ve got a bit of a tan,” Oliver said.

  “I’ve been on a millionaire’s boat in South America, sunning, enjoying life,” Collette replied. “Of course, the boat was stolen and we were getting shot at, but beyond that, very luxurious. Hence the tan.”

  Oliver drew his sister into his arms and held her close.

  “If he hadn’t gotten you back here alive, I’d have killed him,” Oliver whispered into her hair. “Damn it, Coll, I was afraid for you.”

  Collette ran her hands up and down his arms and stepped back. “Me, too, little brother. But at least you had Julianna to look after you.”

  “Oliver,” Blue Jay said, sharply.

  He turned to see King Hunyadi looking at him and Julianna expectantly.

  “Your Majesty, I’m sorry,” Julianna began.

  “We’re both sorry,” Oliver said. “It’s just that we were—”

  Hunyadi held up a hand. His eyes spoke of hard-won wisdom, but also of a fondness that touched Oliver.

  “I understand. And it’s good to see you, my friends,” said the king. “But the morning is fleeting and the time has come for all of us to share what we know. For the sake of Euphrasia, for the Two Kingdoms, and two worlds, the Legend-Born must be protected. Morale depends upon hope, and hope, right now, depends upon you two.”

  He nodded at Oliver and then Collette.

  “Your presence means a lot to the human soldiers down there amidst the bloodshed and monsters. Still, it would be simpler if you were elsewhere.”

  Oliver opened his hands wide. “But we’re here. And we can help, Your Majesty. All my life has been about pretending, whether in a court of law or on the stage. The time’s come to do something real.”

  “You can’t—” Julianna began.

  “He’s right,” Collette interrupted. “We have—it’s hard for me to say magic, but we have magic in us. We can help.”

  Frost flowed across the tent on a blast of frigid air. “No. Absolutely not.”

  Oliver turned on him, scowling. “You know, I’ve had just about enough of you pulling the strings. You’ve got some grand plan for us? Great. Hope that goes well for you. But we’ll make our own decisions.”

  The winter man narrowed his eyes, blue-white mist rising from their edges. “I did what I had to do.”

  “Frost,” Blue Jay warned.

  Wayland Smith gazed at Oliver and Collette from beneath the brim of his hat. “The two of you must understand, the outcome of the war is vital, but there are even greater things at stake. We cannot risk your lives, no matter the cost.”

  Oliver pointed at him. “What makes you think I’m going to listen to anything you have to say? Last time I saw you, you murdered a man in that inn at Twillig’s Gorge just because he figured out who I really was. You’ve been in this scheme with Frost from the beginning.”

  Smith raised an eyebrow. He glanced at King Hunyadi, then shifted his gaze back to Oliver. “If you must know, the scheme—as you call it—was primarily mine.”

  Oliver glared at him. “Well, then you’re a fucking asshole.”

  King Hunyadi stepped into the middle of the tent, separating them.

  “Enough.”

  They all looked at the king, but no one argued with him.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver said. To Hunyadi, not to the others.

  The king held up a hand again, brushing it away. He began to ask questions, and soon they were sharing their stories. Frost and Collette spoke of the Atlantean forces. Oliver and Julianna and Blue Jay talked about the chaos they had left in Palenque. Damia reassured them that the anarchy they had begun still raged in the capital city of Yucatazca and beyond.

  “The rebels have nearly taken control of Palenque. They’re demanding that Prince Tzajin return to Yucatazca and address the public himself. They will return control of the city to the prince, but only after hearing the words from his mouth.”

  King Hunyadi nodded. “Yes. According to Frost’s report, mistrust of their purpose has caused the Yucatazcan warriors to lose heart. It may be that we can turn them to our cause or convince them to withdraw from the field of battle.”

  Oliver felt almost as though he were in a courtroom, and Hunyadi the judge. “If it pleases Your Majesty, I’d like to speak.”

  The king smiled thinly. “Now you ask permission?”

  With a glance at Julianna, Oliver nodded. “Look, it seems pretty obvious to me that everyone’s on the same page here. Maybe we’ll win this war on the ground, but it’s a hell of a gamble. Those ships Frost and Collette saw—who knows how many more of them there are? There could be another entire invasion force on the way. We need an ace in the hole, and Prince Tzajin is that ace. I’ve been thinking about this ever since we heard the kid was in Atlantis.”

  Oliver studied King Hunyadi.

  “Your Majesty, I’m going to get him. I’ll find the kid, get him out of Atlantis, and back here. It’s pretty clear that Smith can travel in ways that the Borderkind can’t—ways he doesn’t seem interested in explaining to the rest of us, but that’s fine. Let me choose a small group. I’ll pick them myself. Smith drops us in the middle of Atlantis, as close as possible to the library where he saw Prince Tzajin. We’ll bring him back.”

  At last, he allowed himself to glance at Julianna. Her nostrils flared with anger.

  “Don’t do this,” she said.

  Oliver didn’t reply. He had to do it, and she knew that. After what Ty’Lis had done to them all—the murder of his father, the Sandman terrorizing Collette, the death of Ted Halliwell—how could he not do whatever was necessary to stop Atlantis?

  “After what Ty’Lis did to you, Jules?” Collette said.

  Julianna shot her a withering glance. “You can’t agree with this.”

  “Agree?” Collette replied. “Hell, I’m going with him.”

  Silence fell. One by one, they all looked at King Hunyadi. The big man stroked his beard. At length, he glanced at Frost and Smith.

  “Your Majesty, the risk,” Smith warned.

  Frost shook his head. The familiar sound of his icicle hair clinking made Oliver nostalgic for a time before resentment and deceit had come between them.

  “You can’t let them both go, Majesty,” the winter man said.

  “What a surprise,” Oliver mused. “One of us is expendable.”

  Blue Jay glanced at Damia, who seemed to be growing impatient to join her troops. “They’re right.” He glanced at Oliver and Collette. “I’m sorry, my friends, but they’re right. You can’t both go. I’m not one of the Lost. It matters not to me if your people ever get home. But if you both die, that’s a victory for Atlantis, and it could undermine all that Euphrasia is fighting for.”

  King Hunyadi raised both hands. “Agreed. And it is decided. Oliver, choose your allies. Smith, you’ll take them in and bring them back, with the prince.”

  “I’m not supposed to interfere, John,” the Wayfarer said grimly from beneath the brim of his hat. His eyes were shadows.

  “You aren’t. You’ll ferry them, nothing more.”

  Smith didn’t argue further.

  Julianna had no such compunction. “So, what?” she said, staring at Oliver. “I’m just supposed to wait for you, again, wondering if you’re dead or alive, trapped in this crazy place alone?”

  Oliver glanced away. “You won’t be alone.”

  “No,” Collette agreed. “I’ll be with you. They’re not going to let me go.”

  Julianna glanced around the tent, fixing her eyes one by one on Frost, Smith, King Hunyadi, and Oliver.

  “Fucking men.” She turned and left the tent.

  Collette stared at her brother for a moment. Then she went to him, hugged him close, and looked up at his face.


  “I’ll look out for her. You look out for yourself. Don’t think I’m not pissed, though. I want you coming back alive so I can kick your ass.”

  Oliver kissed her forehead.

  “Wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

  Sara woke in the small hours of the night, the Maine wind howling outside the windows. A storm had blown up, but she couldn’t hear the patter of rain. Just that wind, rattling the windows in their frames and whistling in the eaves. Her father’s house was a relic of the past.

  It surprised her to find that she’d fallen asleep. All day she had been on the phone, ordering the shutoff of the utilities, calling her friends in Atlanta and an editor she knew would give her work. Calling her mother, and crying again. Both of them weeping for a man they had never found a way to stop loving, even in the times when they had wanted to.

  When she’d gone to bed, her mind had been bustling with activity, with plans and their repercussions, all the while trying to avoid the truth around which it all revolved. Her father’s house would soon be empty, and it might be that way forever. She’d tossed and turned with these thoughts, wide awake, first too warm and tossing the covers away, then freezing cold and retrieving them, burrowing underneath.

  Somehow, she’d managed to drift off.

  Now she stretched, head muzzy with sleep, and listened to the creak of the old house and the cries of the wind, and wondered if that was what had woken her. The clock on the wall ticked. The seconds seemed to pass too slowly, lengthening, stretching out as though hesitant to move on. Tick. A breath. Tick. Its oddness drew her. Eyes closed, she listened intently, wondering if the battery was dying. And as she strained to make sense of the sluggish passage of time on that clock, she heard another sound.

  A sifting.

  A shiver ran up her back. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh. The sound seemed familiar, but she knew she had never heard anything precisely like it before. The sifting, scratching noise seemed to cascade toward her, and then abruptly ceased.

  “What the hell?” she said, mostly to hear herself speak.

  Sara turned, rising from the pillow, and her breath caught in her throat. The thing that stood by her bed could not have been a man. Not with those fingers like knives and its long, cruel face, and the terrible lemon eyes that shone in the dark.

  She screamed, letting out a torrent of words and curses and pleadings to God as she scrambled off the bed. Her right ankle tangled in the sheet, she fell to the floor with a thump and then backed into a corner. As she went, those lemon eyes followed her, the hooded thing coming over the top of the bed at her as though weightless.

  Perhaps it was because she had been sleeping in her father’s house, or perhaps because all of her fear and grief were bound tightly to Ted Halliwell’s vanishing. But in that moment, Sara called for her father like she had as a little girl, waking in the dark from a nightmare.

  “Daddy!”

  The cruel, hooded thing froze with its knife fingers stretched out toward her. Lemon eyes went dark.

  Like a statue, it had frozen solid, halfway across her bed.

  Within the consciousness of the Sandman, Ted Halliwell screamed his daughter’s name. She’d called out to him. His powdered bones sifted with the sand and the dust, and he fought the horrid will of the monster. Holding him back was like stopping a bull from charging, yet he had done it. His soul felt as though the strain would tear it apart, but for the moment, the Sandman had been halted.

  Grains of sand shifted. Skittered to the floor.

  No, Halliwell thought. But he knew it was no use. His love for Sara had given him the strength to stop the Sandman, but he would not be able to hold the monster.

  Pain clutched at the core of him, the part that would have been his heart if he still had flesh. The maelstrom that was the Sandman had slowed. It parted like curtains—like a veil—and he could feel the hatred searing him. Those terrible eyes looked inward, now, and they found Halliwell there, alone.

  “I wanted my vengeance,” the Sandman said. The voice echoed around inside the maelstrom, inside the consciousness that was all that remained of Ted Halliwell save those powdered bones, scattered amidst the grains of the monster. “The fox bitch, Kitsune, and the nothing, weakling man, Bascombe. They turned my brother against me and I wanted vengeance. You denied me that vengeance, little nothing man. You infest me like pestilence, like rot, like conscience, and I will not have it.

  “You must be punished. The little girl’s eyes will pop in my teeth, and I will be certain that you can taste them on my tongue, as if it were your own.”

  The words/thoughts slithered inside Halliwell’s mind, and whatever trace remained of him, soul or echo, shuddered—not with fear, but with rage. The man in him might have let death and this bizarre damnation corrupt his spirit, weaken him, but his daughter called his name and now this abomination mocked her love for him and her pain. The man might be afraid, but Ted Halliwell was more than a man. The soldier in him, the detective in him, the father in him was not afraid.

  His grip on the Sandman tightened.

  The monster roared fury. Halliwell felt aware of every bone shard, every particle of yellowed bone and marrow that mixed with the substance of the Sandman, and he reached out into the paralyzed limbs of the child-killer and he took hold.

  Fucker, he said/thought. That’s my little girl.

  Awareness radiated out from Halliwell’s consciousness. His senses searched the maelstrom, knowing already what he would find. There, hiding in the midst of the soul-storm created by the merger of their spirits, their essences, he found the third consciousness locked inside this body. Peering, spying, from the maelstrom, was the Dustman. Swiftly brutal, the Dustman might be the brother of the Sandman—another aspect of the same legend—but he was also a kind of mirror. The Dustman was an English legend, proper and grim. He was a creature of order, where his brother was chaos and anarchy.

  Help me, damn you! The blood’s on all of our hands, now. You can’t just hide, or he’ll erode you away to nothing!

  Still the Dustman did not stir.

  The Sandman remained paralyzed, but Halliwell’s grip began to slip. Somewhere beyond the tiny universe that existed within the maelstrom, he heard his daughter’s voice again. She muttered prayers to God. By now she’d be rising from that corner, trying to get past the monster to reach for the phone to call the police, or maybe she’d just run.

  God, Halliwell hoped she would run.

  “He’s a coward,” the voice of the Sandman sifted through the churning gloom around Halliwell. “He dared to stand against me, to betray his brother, and now he’ll be nothing, no more than you.”

  Listen to me, Halliwell hissed at the Dustman. All of those children you visited, the ones who couldn’t sleep or didn’t want to…you were gentle with them. You cast your dust in their eyes and they slept in peace and dreamed the way children should. I’ve felt your mind, I’ve seen it all in your thoughts. We’re all part of each other, now. Is this what you want? To terrify those kids, to murder them in their beds, to mutilate their—

  “It’s exactly what he wants,” the Sandman said.

  Halliwell’s soul—whatever remained of it—froze at those words. Could that be true? Was that what the Dustman had always wanted? Was that why his brother was ascendant, now, because he didn’t want to fight?

  “You lie!” the Dustman roared.

  He stepped from the maelstrom, closer to Halliwell now than he had been since the two of them were merged with the Sandman, spirits trapped within. In his greatcoat and bowler hat and with that mustache, he might have seemed almost absurd were it not for the hatred in his gleaming, golden eyes.

  I thought I could do nothing, the Dustman said, but now the voice did not echo in the maelstrom. It was right beside Halliwell, in his own mind, thought to thought. I’m only a facet of the legend. A shard. That’s what you’ve become yourself, Detective. A facet.

  But that’s all he is, Halliwell replied. One facet.
/>
  Yes.

  Halliwell held out his hand for the Dustman to shake, to seal the deal.

  The maelstrom calmed. Halliwell felt the Sandman try to break free of his grip and the form he had given himself in this nothing place, this spirit cage inside the prison of the Sandman, was thrown down.

  “Go to hell,” Halliwell snarled, and he stood, reaching out once again to shake the Dustman’s hand. There was power in a vow. An oath. And that was what they were about to enter into.

  Then the Sandman was there. Somehow he was their cage, but he was also there inside the mindscape with them. Those dreadful yellow eyes peered out from beneath his hood.

  “I will not allow it,” he said, almost a sigh, a skittering of words and sand.

  Halliwell smiled. The bastard was too late. He and the Dustman clasped hands…

  Sara ran around the bed, colliding with the closet door and pushing off. She lunged for the phone on the nightstand, snatched it off the cradle, and even as she did, she turned to look at the bizarre statue—rough like concrete—on the bed.

  It said her name. The whispering voice did not sound cruel or mocking. Instead, it sounded familiar.

  She froze.

  No longer a statue, the thing began to shift and flow as though reality were ocean waves rolling in and reshaping it. The hood went away. The figure slid to the end of the bed, away from her, stood facing her. Its cloak had become a long coat, collar turned up high around its neck. A derby sat upon its head, made of the same material as the coat and the monster’s hands, its flesh.

  Sand.

  It looked up at her and she caught her breath. Lemon eyes had turned golden. It had a thick drooping mustache, but all of the same shade, the same gray brown of sand.

  But the face…she knew the face.

  “Daddy?” she whispered.

  The strength went out of her legs and she staggered back, catching herself against the doorjamb, barely staying on her feet.

  The thing looked unsure a moment, but then a smile spread across its face, lifting that mustache. Her father’s smile. All of the things that Robiquet had told her—about the Veil and the creatures of legend, about the Borderkind—came back to her now.