She pressed her forehead to the glass with a soft sigh, peering down at the battered cliff that dropped off into churning waves. “What’s the plan?”
“There is no plan.”
She spun about, arching a brow on Greyston.
“The plan,” Kelan countered, “is to head north along the coastline but keep a sharp eye on deeper waters.”
“North?” Greyston said with a cynical drawl. “You sound quite sure of that.”
“Or south,” Kelan said. “Take your pick, Greyston, your guess is as good as mine. Ten miles—”
“South it is,” Greyston cut in, his hand already on one of the gears. “Lily, I think Neco has found a pair of breeches for you that will do a better job than those shreds. It is the middle of winter and you’ll be of no use to anyone if you freeze to death.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Armand said as he joined them. “I’ve already asked Neco to find something. I assumed you wouldn’t mind, Lord Adair.”
“Not at all.”
Lily glanced down the length of her sorry state. “You’re probably right. I’ll be right back,” she said as she made her way past Armand.
She passed through the boarding cabin and found a set of ladder steps on the grid, leading up to a second level. Assuming that’s where Greyston’s sleeping quarters were, she climbed up and was making her way along the railed passageway when Neco stepped from a room at the very end with a pair of breeches.
Lily used Greyston’s room to change. She had to fold the waistline down a couple of times and tuck the pants legs into her boots, but it would do.
Another shift in the ship’s vibrations. Had Greyston altered course again? Had Kelan seen something? She charged out again, her heart hammering urgency through her veins. She had a sudden, awful premonition that the world would end before she reached them.
She skidded into the Pilot Cabin and slammed a fist to her ridiculous heart. Everyone was exactly as she’d left them. More or less. Greyston leaned over the console dashboard, one hand still on the gears. Kelan and Armand stood behind the pilot chairs.
Lily moved in beside Kelan and saw what they were all staring at. The bulky shadow of what could only be an enormous ship.
“The Gossamer?” she breathed out.
Kelan drew a line from the end that hung over the water to the nose that reached all the way to a cliff that jutted into the ocean. “The bridge.”
The Red Hawk swooped up and inland. “I’m taking us around,” Greyston said. “I’d prefer to keep a healthy distance from Agares’ reach.”
He slapped a pair of binoculars at Kelan. “Is the hull door lowered?”
Kelan put the glass to his eyes, moving with the ship’s rotation to keep his angle focussed on the Gossamer.
“No,” he said after a moment. “Not unless the door’s on the other side. They’re positioned above a rock just off the coast. Black Rock?”
“What do you see?” Lily asked when he went silent, her own eyes glued to the shadow.
“Someone’s standing on the cliff.” He handed her the binoculars. “Agares?”
Lily took a look, quickly confirming that the blonde-haired woman draped in blue velvet was indeed the Queen demon. She handed the binoculars back to Kelan. “She’s watching the Gossamer like a hawk. Something is about to happen.”
They lost sight of the Gossamer completely as the Red Hawk carved a wide circle in the Aether, but when Greyston scooped low to set down on a headland, the warship was directly north of them and no longer a shadow. Still a fair distance away, but close enough to discern the ship’s features.
“What are you doing?” Kelan demanded.
“You wanted to observe and evaluate,” Greyston said. He pointed to the binoculars Kelan had strung around his neck. “We can do that from down here as good as in the air.”
Kelan’s face hardened. “Fine, but keep the engines fired up.”
“I intend to. Come,” Greyston said, leading the way from the cabin. “Let’s take a proper look. Neco,” he called “lower the boarding platform.”
A few minutes later, they’d gathered outside the Red Hawk on the gusting headland. Lily tugged her gloves on. She’d lost her scarf somewhere along the way, so she tucked her chin in against the biting cold.
Kelan noticed. “You should stay inside.”
“No, that’s…” She glanced over her shoulder as she spoke, saw the platform rising.
She looked around. Neco. Armand. Kelan.
“Greyston,” she shouted, spinning back to the Red Hawk. The ramp was up, sealing the hull. “Neco, what is he doing?”
Neco had no answer.
When she started forward, Kelan pulled her back. “The ship’s lifting, Lily.”
She stared at the Red Hawk’s vertical ascent, absolutely stumped. “What on earth is Greyston doing?”
“Running?” Kelan offered.
“No, he wouldn’t.”
“Grey would never leave without me,” Neco stated.
“You’re both right.” Kelan turned his eyes back to the Gossamer. “I’m in a particularly sardonic mood today and even I can’t quite believe that.”
Lily watched the Red Hawk perform a tight loop and shoot off.
“For someone who isn’t running,” Armand noted, “he’s sailing damned fast in the wrong direction.”
“Christ Almighty.”
Lily’s wide-eyed stare swung to Kelan. The binoculars were up again, trained just left of the Gossamer’s nose. There was movement on the land, too far away for her to make out the particulars, but people, she’d guess. An absolute crowd.
“Ten, fifteen, twenty-three…” Neco stopped counting the bodies picked out with his enhanced eyesight. “Men and women, more than fifty now, disembarking from the Gossamer.”
Armand strode to the edge of the headland cliff. “Demon or human?”
“Demon, I imagine,” Kelan barked.
“Where did Agares find them?”
His view swerved toward the ocean. “Something’s happening between that rock and the ship. A black stream, or smoke, being sucked up.”
“Into the ship?” asked Armand.
“The hull door is on the other side, but possibly.” He swung the binoculars across to land.
“Eighty-six, ninety, one hundred and two,” Neco counted.
“Black Rock,” Kelan said in a low voice, speaking to himself. “The portal. Demon spirits. They’re not taking a human form until they’re on the ship.”
Without binoculars or enhanced vision, all Lily saw was the smudge thickening and spreading over the top of the cliff.
Just then, the melodic note of a violin’s shivery twang stroked the sky. She looked up to see the streak of black, the glimpse of red, and her chest constricted. No ship could sail at that speed, a speed her eyes could barely track, without imploding. The Red Hawk usually thrummed the Aether. Now it sounded as if it were splicing the individual particles.
“The bloody fool,” Kelan bit out. “He wouldn’t…”
He did. The Red Hawk hit the Gossamer, dead centre. Lily jumped at the impact, a silent, far off explosion of wood and metal and canvas. The Gossamer bent in the middle, an arrow pointing to the water, and then the nose slid from the edge of the cliff and the entire warship plunged into the ocean, taking whatever remained of the Red Hawk buried in her belly with it.
Lily’s pulse slowed with the dull thud, thud, thud of her heart. A scream started deep inside her, a scream she couldn’t find the breath to push out.
“He destroyed the Gossamer,” Armand said. “He sacrificed himself to stop the demon flow.”
“Lily…?”
The voice came from an echo chamber in Lily’s head,
“Lily!”
An arm came around her shoulders. “Lily, I’m sorry. This is not what I would ever have asked of him.”
She shoved out of Kelan’s arms. Shut out the sympathetic tone. “Is that really so? You wouldn’t have asked this of Greyston?” Tears
pricked her eyes, then she just let them stream until she couldn’t see. “The McAllisters pulled him into this fight before he was even born. He lost everything. Do you know that?” Her voice pitched. Hysteria and fury and useless, useless grief.
“His mother. His brother. His home. Georgina bloody Bonnington. His father thought he was a monster.” She struck out. Hit chest. “The McAllisters and demons have ruled his life, ruined his life, and now they’ve taken it.”
His arms wrapped around her. “I know, Lily,” he said gruffly. “That is why I would never have asked this of him. He means too much to you. He has already given too much. I am so sorry.”
“No.” She drew in a shuddering sob and pushed away from him. “No!”
She refused to accept.
“Neco!” She looked around wildly for the man.
His thought process was one step ahead of her. He stood near the head of the cliff with his legs braced and his arms folded, his eyes scouring the ocean.
She ran up to him. “Do you see anything?”
“Floating debris,” he told her.
“No bodies?”
“The demons would have been banished as soon as they hit the water.”
Lily pursed her lips. “Greyston?”
“I’m looking.”
Kelan and Armand strode up to them.
“There is no way he could have survived,” Kelan said. But he still lifted the binoculars and trained them seaward instead of on the demon infestation crawling on land.
They stood there, waiting, searching. Every now and then, Kelan turned the binoculars toward the demons, but he always came back to the search.
Lily tried to stay positive, but her hope deflated as time dragged without any evidence of Greyston. And she hadn’t forgotten about the rest of the world. “What about Agares?”
Kelan shrugged. “There are more than a hundred demons there.”
“One hundred and sixty-two,” Neco said.
“Even I can’t take on that many on my own,” Kelan continued. “I need to get back to Cragloden, but we’ll do this first.”
More time dragged.
Then Neco spotted something.
It must be him. The vice around Lily’s chest released.
Kelan slung his view in the direction Neco pointed. “A body, floating on a piece of ship.”
“He’s not moving?” Lily said, peering so hard at where they looked, her eyeballs hurt. But she saw nothing.
“He is lying face down, but it is Grey, and he’s drifting south,” Neco said. “The tide’s pulling him our way.”
Kelan pushed the binoculars into Lily’s hands. “The current appears to be on our side, but the waves will take him once he reaches surf. Neco, I need your eyes with me.”
Before Lily could register his intention, Kelan and Neco were scrambling down a rocky path to a sandy cove nestled below. Assuming they intended to be in place to rescue Greyston when the waves washed him up to shore, she lifted the binoculars, scanning the choppy waters in the vicinity where he’d been spotted, and soon found his lifeless, drifting body. No, not lifeless!
The current teased, pulling him closer to the shore, pushing him further out, but slowly and surely bringing him southward. When she looked down to the cove again, it was to see Kelan striding into the surf. He’d stripped his coat and shirt, his boots, and then he was gone, diving beneath a crashing wave.
Her heart almost collapsed. She pressed a fist to her mouth, needing Greyston saved, dreading that she might lose them both.
“He’s a strong swimmer.” Armand put a hand on her shoulder. “If he gets into trouble, he’ll turn back.”
Kelan struck out beyond the surf and treaded water until Neco pointed him in the right direction.
Through the binoculars, Lily watched as Kelan cut through the rough ocean with powerful ease. When he reached Greyston, he didn’t linger, didn’t appear to even try and rouse him. He hung onto the piece of ship and kicked with his legs, pushing both of them closer and closer to the cove.
“Come on,” Armand said, his hand sliding to her arm with a firm tug to pull her around. “I need you to help me gather sticks, dry shrub, whatever you can find.”
“A fire!” Lily realised, instantly grateful to have something constructive to do instead of fretting.
“With the amount of time they’ve both been in the water, they’ll need proper heat to raise their body temperatures and I haven’t seen any sign of civilisation. We could be miles from the nearest homestead.”
TWENTY ONE
Kelan gave one final push and let the last wave take Greyston. It took all his strength to stagger through the back-pull of the current, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, his legs trembling with strain. The bitter temperature of the ocean had clamped his lungs, retarded his muscles. He broke shore at the same time that Neco surged into the surf to grab the makeshift raft and pull it onto the sandy beach.
“Don’t lift him yet,” Kelan warned as he went for the heap of clothes he’d discarded earlier. “He’s impaled on something. It looks like it’s through the shoulder.”
He pulled his coat on, his numb fingers stumbling as he did up a couple of buttons, enough to keep his chest relatively closed off from the freezing wind.
Leaving his boots for later, he grabbed his shirt and made his way back to Neco.
Greyston lay on his stomach, his face turned to the side, his cheek squashed to the chunk of wood. A lump swelled at his temple. Other than a ragged line of dried blood at his hairline, his face was pasty white. His eyelids hadn’t fluttered, not once that Kelan had seen.
“I tried speaking to him, but he’s not responsive.” Kelan put two fingers to the tender skin beneath Greyston’s jaw. “Dammit, I don’t feel a pulse.”
Neco bent low, putting his ear near Greyston’s mouth. “His breath is rattled and shallow, but he’s definitely breathing.”
“That’s a start.” He ripped his shirt into four strips. Then he pointed to the sharp tip just pricking through Greyston’s sodden coat, an inch or so below the collar seam. “We need to do this quickly. Pull him off and stem the blood. If we’re lucky, that stake missed anything vital.”
Kelan tramped down on the edge of the raft and, on the count of three, Neco heaved Greyston’s body up, leaving behind a bloodied spike of splintered wood. Greyston groaned, freezing them both for a moment.
“He’s coming around,” Neco said, kneeling in the sand and arranging Greyston into a sitting position against him.
The upper left part of Greyston’s shirt was lightly stained with washed-out blood, but the wound itself barely trickled.
“This isn’t good,” Kelan said as he used the cotton strips from his own shirt to bind Greyston’s shoulder. “His body temperature must be close to hyperthermia to slow his blood down this much. We need to get him warmed up.”
Greyston didn’t make another sound as they dressed him in Neco’s dry shirt and overcoat.
“Go on ahead,” Kelan said as Neco scooped Greyston into his arms with a possessive hold. The man probably thought Kelan would hinder more than help, and he wouldn’t be far wrong.
While Neco scaled the cliff side effortlessly, Kelan sank down on the sand to tug his boots on.
Agares.
The ungodly number of demons that had come through Black Rock.
He set that aside for now. He needed men, weapons… He needed his army and Armand’s miracle menagerie and that was all back at Cragloden.
What he needed right now was a damn fire. Pushing to his feet, he rubbed some warmth into his arms. The damp cold still cut bone deep, refusing to leave his body. With the first step he took, a cramp seized his calf. He stretched that leg out and bent double to massage the muscle. He was in a worse state than he’d realised. But he didn’t regret it, not even when he’d assumed he was retrieving Greyston’s body for a decent burial.
When he finally made it to the top of the cliff, he found Neco feeding a log stump into a fledgling fire. Gre
yston lay on his side, within reach of the flames. A couple of heather bushels had been crushed for his pillow. Lily knelt beside him, stroking his forehead with the back of her hand.
Her eyes met his and held as he walked over.
“How is he?” Kelan asked.
“He hasn’t woken, not properly, but he’s made some noises and he has moved.” Her hand stroked his forehead as she spoke. “Armand thinks he might have a concussion.”
Kelan nodded. “He took a blow to the temple, and he’s likely still fighting the freezing cold.”
His gaze wandered to where Armand gathered twiggy branches as he hunched down to spread his hands over the flames. He should probably mention the blood loss, but Lily’s eyes were still swollen from the earlier tears and it was clear, in the tilt of her chin, in the stiffness of her shoulders, she was desperately clinging to every shred of hope.
“Kelan?”
His gaze flashed to her. Her smile, small and restrained and sincere, reached where the flames could not. Kelan didn’t resist the pull. He would have opened his arms to her, offered anything she needed, if he hadn’t made such a holy mess of them before he’d left for Florence.
“Thank you,” she said.
Two simple words that contained a paragraph of unvoiced emotion.
He inclined his head in acknowledgment, but said, “Greyston is the one who must be thanked. God knows how many more demons would have crossed if he hadn’t pulled that damn foolish stunt.”
He straightened to look at the congregation of demons two cliff tops over, shading his eyes from the midday sun with a palm squared to his brow.
“They’re all still there, including Agares,” Lily said. “What are they waiting for?”
“Agares has big plans and a drastically reduced army,” he deduced. “Maybe we’re not the only ones forced to pause and re-evaluate.”
He turned, swinging his gaze down the coastline. “We’re not all that far from home. The Firth of Tay lies roughly ten miles south and Cragloden is only half an hour’s walk from where it empties into the ocean. There aren’t any villages or towns between here and there, but if I get started now, I could make it back with the carriage before nightfall.”
The Dark Matters Quartet Page 85
