Lost Ones-Veil 3

by Christopher Golden

  The stone had been etched with a single word. Four letters that comprised her wish for his spirit, for the wings of his soul, as well as a constant reminder to live by his example.

  Soar.

  Damia stood, shook fallen leaves from her cloak, and looked out at the lake and the castle once more. A soft smile touched her lips. She glanced at the small grave.

  “I know what you’d say. Time to make my own adventures.”

  She stared again at the four letters etched into the marker and nodded. Then she turned and started away.

  On the other side of the hill, a complement of twenty members of the King’s Guard awaited her on horseback. Hunyadi himself spurred away from the others. He held the reins of her horse—its saddle as black as her own battle dress—and he brought the beast to her. Damia recognized the honor. That the king should keep hold of her horse while she spent a few minutes on farewells, instead of delegating the job to some page, was a gesture of extraordinary respect and fondness.

  “I’m grateful, Your Majesty.”

  “As am I, Commander, for so many things,” the king replied. “We must ride, now, though. The journey to Vienna is long.”

  Damia gripped the pommel, put one foot in the stirrup and threw her other leg over. In the saddle, holding the reins, she felt her mind clearing. There was work to be done. The United Nations was holding a special session in Vienna to meet with representatives from Euphrasia, just as they had already met with the new king of Yucatazca—some cousin of Mahacuhta’s—in Rio de Janeiro. Hunyadi had made Commander Beck the Euphrasian ambassador to the UN. It meant everything to her. Many of her people were attempting to return to the nations of their births, or of their ancestors’ origins. But Damia would always be Euphrasian.

  “Let’s be off, then,” she said.

  Damia snapped the reins and the horse began to trot. His Majesty rode at her side and the King’s Guard fell in behind them.

  As she rode, she caught sight of a pair of birds—perhaps the two she had seen moments ago—taking flight from the Castle of Otranto. They darted across the surface of the lake, flying low, chasing one another, moving as though dancing together on the air.

  She watched until they soared up and over a distant hill, out of sight.

  On a blustery afternoon in mid-November, the trees mostly stripped of leaves and scraping skeletal branches at the low-slung gray sky, Sara Halliwell drove along a winding road to the north of Kitteridge, Maine. The Old Post Road seemed to go nowhere, the sort of route that would make those unfamiliar with it wonder with alarming frequency whether or not they had taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. In truth, the Old Post Road did lead somewhere, but the towns to the northwest existed in a locale that could only be considered the middle of nowhere.

  Sara had spent the late spring and early summer in Maine with her father, helping him to adjust to what he’d become, and the way the world had changed for all of them. There had been so many questions, government inquiries, and requests for help from friends and allies who were having an even more difficult time coming to terms with this new world.

  Many still thought of her father as a monster. To their eyes, he had discovered the soulless killer who had murdered so many children, and had become that very thing. Several newspaper editorials had suggested that he stand trial for the sins and crimes of the Sandman. But that was only talk. Even if they could find a jury willing to convict him, the law would not be able to hold him.

  Eventually, those voices found other things to rage about.

  During those long months, Sara and her father found a new peace. The relationship would never be perfect, but Sara felt sure that things like that, like the perfect father-daughter relationship, were the real myths. She loved him, and he loved her. Whatever Ted Halliwell had endured, he had awoken to a new life in which the choices his daughter made in her life troubled him not at all. Her happiness was all that mattered to him. Sometimes they bickered, but there was a tenderness even in that.

  Sara had spent the late summer and early fall in Atlanta, packing up her studio and meeting with former clients, hoping to get leads on new business in the northeast. Her new photography studio in Boston wouldn’t open until January or February, but already she had work lined up.

  Yet the idea of photographing fashion models and advertising layouts again left her cold. She kept it to herself, but there were so many new beauties, so many bits of breathtaking magic in the world now, that those were the things she wanted to capture with her camera.

  Still, a girl had to eat.

  The road ahead curved to the right and she followed it, the car buffeted by the November wind. The weatherman had predicted rain, but so far she had not seen a drop. She glanced at her odometer, trying to figure out how far she’d gone since getting onto the Old Post Road. If the directions her father had given her were accurate, she ought to be almost there by now.

  Almost as the thought occurred to her, she caught sight of the house looming up on the right. Beyond the pine trees and bare oaks, situated at the peak of a distant hill, stood a massive, sprawling Victorian. On that grim day, the lights in its many windows were warm and inviting. Smoke rose from two separate chimneys.

  Sara caught her breath and put her foot on the brake, slowing to turn into the dirt path that led up through the trees. She drove carefully up the hill until she arrived at the front of the house, where she parked and climbed out of the car.

  Her keys dangled from her hand as she stared up at the house.

  It had been built entirely out of sand.

  The front door opened and her father stepped out, wearing that long coat that he so favored but thankfully without the silly bowler hat.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” said the Dustman.

  Sara ran to him and threw her arms around him. She kissed his rough cheek. The sand was warm.

  “Did you bring your camera?” he asked.

  “Oh, right.” She went back to the car and popped the trunk, pulling out her camera bag and slinging it over her shoulder. When she returned to him, he stepped aside to let her into the house.

  “What’s the big mystery, Dad?” Sara asked.

  Her father smiled. “Come in.”

  She went through the door. He followed and closed it behind her. Sara gazed around, mouth open in wonder. The house was vast inside. A long corridor led away on either side of the grand staircase in the midst of the foyer. The stairs split, both sides leading up to a balcony on the second floor, overlooking the entryway. The place felt a bit chilly, but she could smell the woodsmoke from the fireplaces, and the oil lamps that seemed to be everywhere gave the house the feeling of an age long gone by.

  “Follow me,” he said, starting for the stairs.

  “Dad?”

  Ted Halliwell turned and smiled at his daughter. “Sara, follow me.”

  She did, up the stairs to the second-floor balcony. The wide corridor there led deeper into the house. Both sides of the hall were lined with doors, and the corridor seemed impossibly long, as though it might go on forever.

  “Magic,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  Sara turned to her father. Adjusting the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, she stared into his eyes. “What is this? Where does it go?”

  “Not ‘it.’ They. Every one of these doors opens into a different part of the world, some ordinary and some legendary. We can go anywhere in the merged world, see everything with our own eyes, or through the lens of that camera.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head, speechless.

  The Dustman shrugged. “You’ve got no plans for the next couple of months, until you open your new studio. You said so yourself.”

  He reached out for his daughter’s hand. “So, where do you want to go first?”

  Sara laughed, stared down that long corridor at all of those doors, fighting disbelief. But there was no room in the world now for disbelief.

  She took his hand.

  “Surprise me.”
<
br />   On a cold, crisp night during the first week of December, Oliver Bascombe sat in the familiar chair in his mother’s parlor and stared into the fireplace. The logs roared and crackled with flames. He’d built himself up quite a blaze and sat, now, reading Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. The book brought him comfort. Since childhood, he’d read it many times, always in this room, in this chair. In his imagination, he had sailed aboard The Ghost with Wolf Larsen, traveling into danger and adventure.

  Oliver slipped a finger into the book and reached up to rub at his eyes. The fire flickered ghostly orange on the walls. He might be getting tired, but he thought, perhaps, something else troubled him beyond the heat of the fire getting to his eyes.

  The Sea Wolf had lost some of its magic. Danger and adventure no longer had the allure for him that they had when he’d been a boy.

  A gentle knock came at the door, and then it swung open. Unbidden, Friedle entered the room carrying a small tray, upon which sat a steaming mug of the thick cocoa the man had been making for him ever since his mother had died. Oliver knew memory could play tricks, but it seemed to him that Friedle always got the cocoa exactly right. Nobody else had ever been able to duplicate it.

  “Good evening, Oliver,” said the fussy little man.

  Oliver smiled. “Friedle, your timing is incredible. You have no idea how much I needed this right now.”

  But of course he did. Friedle had been watching out for Oliver and Collette for years, keeping them out of too much trouble. He seemed always to know what they needed, and to be there when it mattered most.

  “Thank you,” Oliver said, taking the tray from him and setting it on the coffee table.

  “You’re very welcome.”

  Oliver took a sip from his cup. A smile creased his lips. Perhaps Jack London’s stories were no longer enough to transport him back to his childhood, but here in this room—which he would forever think of as his mother’s parlor—with the fire burning and the taste of that cocoa on his lips, he remembered what magic felt like.

  Not the magic in his hands, or that which had returned to the world…the magic that only existed on the inside.

  Friedle started to withdraw. Oliver glanced at him. They knew, now, that Friedle had never been his real name. The goblin who had served the legendary Melisande—his mother—was called Robiquet. But from the moment they had returned to the house on that high, craggy bluff overlooking the ocean, Oliver and Collette had persisted in calling him Friedle. For his part, the fussy man seemed to prefer it. Friedle behaved as if nothing had changed, save for the absence of his former employer, Max Bascombe.

  “I miss him,” Oliver said.

  “Pardon?”

  “My father. It’s strange, don’t you think? I spent so many years wishing for the courage to get out from under his shadow, and now that he’s gone, I want him back.”

  Friedle nodded. “We all miss them, when they’re gone. He wasn’t a bad man, your father. He was just afraid for you.”

  Oliver took another sip. “I never thought of him as afraid of anything.”

  “For himself, of course not. The only thing that frightened Max Bascombe was the idea of something happening to one of his children.”

  The cocoa tasted sweet as ever, thick on his tongue. In his entire life, he had never invited his father to join him in the parlor on one of those long nights when he would retreat here. The old man would have declined, he was sure. Still, Oliver wondered.

  “Thank you, Friedle.”

  “I’m quite looking forward to tomorrow,” the old goblin said. “Good night, Oliver.”

  “Night.”

  After Friedle had gone, he sat with his finger still holding the page in The Sea Wolf and sipped his cocoa until only traces were left at the bottom of the cup. Only then did he consider the book again, but after a moment he put it aside, not bothering to mark his place.

  “Hello, little brother.”

  Startled, he looked up. Collette stood in the doorway in blue flannel pajamas covered with monkeys. She looked adorable as hell, but he wouldn’t mention it, knowing she would hit him.

  “I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  As he spoke, Julianna appeared in the hallway behind Collette in a burgundy terry cloth robe that usually hung on the back of Oliver’s bedroom door but was rarely worn.

  “We couldn’t sleep,” Julianna said.

  Mischief sparkled in her eyes and her smile lightened his heart.

  “Excited about tomorrow, or nervous?” he asked.

  Collette came in and sat on the sofa beside his chair. “What about you, Ollie? You’re not nervous?” She picked up his cup and peeked inside, disappointed to find it empty, though Oliver felt sure that Friedle had brought the two women their own cocoa tray before retiring for the night.

  Oliver held out his hand to Julianna. “Not at all.”

  She wrapped her fingers around his and he pulled her onto his lap on the chair. A stranger would not have seen the tiny wince at the corners of her eyes, but Oliver felt what she felt. The scar on her abdomen ought to have been the only reminder of the dagger Ovid Tsing had stabbed her with. But, all these months later, it still pained her sometimes when the weather was damp and cold. He suspected it always would.

  “Are you sure?” Julianna asked, touching the smoothness of his face. The scraggly beard he’d grown during their time across the Veil had been gone since June.

  He kissed her, pressed his forehead against hers, and watched the reflection of the firelight glowing in her eyes. “Completely.”

  “It’s going to be a pretty extraordinary day,” Collette said.

  Oliver and Julianna broke their trance and looked at her, content in one another, but never to the point of excluding her. They were a family now, the three of them. Always.

  “A year late, but here we are,” Oliver replied. He ran his hand across Julianna’s back, thinking about their guest list. There would be many of the same guests who had been supposed to attend last December, but others had been added. Sheriff Norris. Ted and Sara Halliwell. The legendary and the ordinary alike had been invited. King Hunyadi himself had promised to attend.

  “I wonder if Frost will come,” Julianna said.

  Oliver smiled. “We’ll know by dawn, I think.”

  Collette looked at him oddly, then cocked her head. “I’ve been wondering if we’ll see Smith.”

  “I doubt it.”

  His sister gave a small shrug. “Maybe not. But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him. Not forever.”

  Julianna lay her head against Oliver’s chest. “Everything has changed. The whole world.”

  Oliver stroked her hair and bent to kiss her again. “Not everything. The important things haven’t changed at all. The things that matter.”

  Collette jumped up. “Speaking of which, it’s almost midnight and you two crazy kids are getting married tomorrow. You know it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride on her wedding day before the ceremony.”

  Julianna rolled her eyes. Oliver did not want to let her go. The memory of her lying there on the ground with blood soaking her clothes remained fresh in his mind. He saw her that way many nights when he closed his eyes, and sometimes he dreamed of that moment, just as he dreamed of the sinking of Atlantis, of the people hurling themselves from buildings, of the power that had been in his hands.

  He could never change the past. He would never allow himself to forget. The outcome had been a triumph over savagery and tyranny, but the cost meant he would never celebrate.

  Somehow, he and Collette and Julianna had all survived.

  “Oliver,” Julianna whispered in his ear.

  He let her pull away. She gave him a wistful look, her gaze lingering on his eyes, and then she kissed him again, slow and sensuous. When she stood and started for the door, Oliver took a deep breath and let it out, casting away the shadow that often hung over him. It was a time for joy. And whenever Julianna was around, he could surrender to it, and to the whims
of fortune.

  To magic, for better or for worse.

  Collette kissed him on the head. “Get some sleep.”

  She followed Julianna out of the room, and Oliver was alone again.

  The fire had begun to die down. After a few minutes, he rose and picked up the cocoa tray. There would be enough chaos tomorrow without anyone having to worry about cleaning up after him.

  A gust of wind rattled the window. Oliver glanced that way and knitted his brows. Curious, he walked over and touched his fingers to the glass, tracing lines in the icy condensation on the inside of the window.

  Outside, it had begun to snow. The first snowfall of winter. It seemed that Frost would attend the wedding after all.

  Oliver turned, and the fox was there.

  Kitsune sat warming herself in front of the fireplace, her tail swishing happily. Her copper fur glinted in the flickering light of the dying blaze. Strips of opalescent scar tissue lined her body and head and snout, places where the fur would never grow again. The scars had a hideous gleam in the firelight.

  The fox turned her jade eyes toward Oliver. Myriad emotions swirled in her gaze—gratitude and love and regret and something akin to happiness. Or perhaps those were merely the things he hoped or expected to see.

  Oliver dropped to his knees and she came to him, nuzzling against him. He stroked her fur without a word. Frost had told him that Kitsune’s wounds were so grievous, that her flesh had been so badly damaged, that she could never change shape again. She would be a fox forever.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For so many things.”

  Kitsune lifted a paw and placed it against his chest. Oliver bent and kissed the soft red fur atop her head.