Collette took a long, shuddering, exhausted breath and pressed her forehead against the wall. The sand scraped her skin, but in frustration she pressed harder and began to slide her forehead to the left, welcoming the sting, the million little shards of pain. She hissed in through her teeth, but then she just stood like that, head leaning on the wall, hands pressed against it on either side of her. The Vittora hummed high and shrill, and now she knew the song.
“I’ve got no strings…to hold me down,” she sang along, voice quaking.
With a shout, she struck the wall. Pain jammed her knuckles.
Something shifted elsewhere in the cell. Rustled. Collette spun and glanced around. The Vittora had stopped its childlike humming and had shrunk to a mere pinprick of illumination. In the light of the moon, she stared around at the haunting gloom of the rounded cell and saw that she was indeed still alone.
The sound came again. A shifting rustle, something familiar about it.
And then she knew: feathers.
Collette craned her neck back and looked up. One of the skeletal creatures she had seen before was crouched in an arched window, green-feathered wings black in the moonlight. Its enormous tangle of antlers hung heavy upon its head. She blinked a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust, and she could barely make out the gleam of its eyes.
“What do you want?” she demanded, hating the tinny, frantic sound of her voice.
The Hunter only perched there, limbs jutting at harsh angles. After a moment it gave a birdlike cock of its head and seemed to study her even more closely. A shiver went through Collette. Its antlers threw moonlight shadows down upon the floor of the cell like the twisted branches of some looming tree outside her bedroom one stormy night.
But there was no storm here. No sound, save a barely audible wind and the rustle of its wings as the Hunter shifted its weight again.
“Stop…why are you just staring at me like that? What do you want?”
It spread its wings and rose, legs tensed, about to take flight.
“No, wait!” she cried. “Please!”
The Hunter paused, regarding her once more. Curiously, it cocked its head again and wrapped its wings around itself like a cloak.
“I know…I know you won’t help me,” she said. No, she wasn’t that much of a fool. This thing wanted to kill her, maybe even eat her, if it was into that. Only the fact that the Sandman wanted her for bait kept the thing from dropping down on her right now.
“But, look, can you just tell me why?”
Silhouetted in the arched window, antlers black streaks across the moon, it lowered into a crouch again. She thought it might actually come down to join her in the pit then, but it remained where it was.
“Why?” the thing repeated, its voice harsh and stilted, as though its mouth was unused to forming words.
In despair, she nodded. “Just…why? Why do you want Oliver dead? Why me? Why…damn it, why us? It’s all riddles and innuendo, and if I’m going to die and my brother is going to die, I’d really like to know why.”
The thing sat for so long staring at her that she was sure she would get no answer. It bent its head and scraped its antlers against the arched window frame, slowly, as if in thought.
Just as she was about to act, to plead, or to scream in frustration, the Hunter spoke.
“You will die because you were never meant to live,” it said in that stilted voice. “You will die because if you are allowed to continue, neither of our worlds will ever be the same. The Bascombes. Creatures of disaster.”
Collette could manage only shallow breaths. She stared at the thing. “Creatures of…what are you talking about? We’ve never done anything to hurt anyone! We’re just…we’re just people. Boring people, for Christ’s sake!”
And then she couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“Please! Oh, God, please just get me out of here! We’ll go away. Oliver and I, we’ll just disappear, change our names, whatever. Nobody in this place will even know we’re still alive. Just let me out, please! Please!”
Even as the words left her lips she hated herself for them, hated the weakness in her. But desperation was all that she had left.
The Hunter spread his wings again. She thought he would fly away for sure now, but a tiny spark of hope remained and she wondered if instead he would fly down into the chamber and pluck her from her prison. It was a foolish hope, she knew, but could not help nurturing it just for a moment.
When he pulled his wings in again, pinioning them against his back, she saw the gray-cloaked reaper behind him.
The Sandman had come, and even the Hunter seemed unaware.
Swift hands reached up, grabbed hold of the Hunter’s antlers, and twisted. Bones snapped and flesh tore wetly as the Sandman ripped the Hunter’s head from his shoulders.
The thing tumbled into the pit with her, wings fluttering as it struck the sand and twitched, wings attempting to move though the body had no head. It shifted toward her several inches and a spurt of blood jetted from the ragged stump where its head had been.
Collette was frozen to the spot, but even had she been able to flee, there was nowhere for her to go.
The Sandman stepped away from the window’s edge and spilled down into the chamber, flowing in a careful avalanche along the wall and then rising up across the cell from her. He held the Hunter’s head in his right hand, antlers clutched in his fist.
“I told them; I tell them all,” he said, “we do not speak to the prey.”
The head fell from his grasp and the sand swallowed it up hungrily, as if it had never been. Then the sand began to slip around the corpse as well. Soon the Hunter would be a memory, a fossil buried deep, and Collette wondered what else had been swallowed up by the sands of this place, this prison.
Then a strange sound reached her—a rasping, grinding noise—and abruptly she realized it was the terrified sound of her own breath. Collette shook all over, heart racing as it had when she had woken from night terrors as a child. But there was no waking from this.
“Please,” she said at last, hating the word more than ever, despising this creature, whom she knew had no understanding of mercy.
The Sandman seemed to fly or flow the short distance between them. His long spindly fingers wrapped around her head, a terrible vise that made her skull feel as though it would pop. She opened her mouth, and the scream that tore from her throat felt like the last vestige of her hope departing. But she lived. She reached up to batter at his arms and his face.
Beneath his hood, he stared at her with those dreadful lemon eyes.
The Sandman drew her close. Collette shrieked her throat raw, fighting him, clawing at him, but he pulled her inexorably toward him. Lemon eyes wide, locking her gaze with his own, he drew her near until their faces were only inches apart.
His lips parted. A pink-brown tongue snaked out. He held her head so tightly, fingers pulling her skin taut, that she could not close her eyes. He ran a tongue like sand across her right eyeball.
Piercing screams filled the chamber. She felt him let her go, felt herself fall to the ground, contorted in a frenzy of revulsion and pain, one hand over her eye.
Darkness claimed her. Blessed unconsciousness, her only escape from the Sandman, from her terror and pain.
And then, unconscious, the nightmares began.
Julianna felt certain she could not walk another step. Yet each time this certainty rose in her mind, Kara would insist they had only a short way to go and she would find enough strength to make it around the next turn or over the next rise. The little girl kept both Julianna and Halliwell going with this persistence and false hope, and yet it seemed like there might be more to it than that. The girl had inhuman endurance, which was not too much of a surprise; Julianna was sure she was no ordinary little girl. But Kara seemed to be able to lend it, at least a little bit, to them, and for that, Julianna was grateful.
“Really. Truly. I can’t keep going. We have to camp for the night. I need to rest, to eat something,” Julianna said.
Halliwell staggered along beside her as though he had just dragged himself from his grave, or was stumbling toward it.
Kara flashed her bright smile and pirouetted in front of them, a sweet, beautiful Pied Piper, luring them along. “You must trust me. It is just over the next rise. If your Oliver is still alive, he will have stopped here. They may have cut his head off already, but he’ll have come to see the king.”
“Just over the next rise?” Julianna asked dubiously.
Halliwell grunted derisively.
“Yes,” Kara insisted, making a face. “Don’t you believe me?”
Julianna laughed softly. “Not a bit. I know you are doing your best to help us, sweetie, but I’m telling you now that if I can’t see the castle from the top of this hill, we’re done. We’re stopping to rest, and sleeping till dawn.”
Kara sighed. “As you wish.”
The night was warm but the breeze was cool, and as exhausted as she was, Julianna shivered with each gentle gust. She wanted a sweatshirt. She wanted a soft bed and a pot of coffee and her TV remote control. Her stomach grumbled and she realized she also wanted cinnamon danish. Nothing else, at that moment. Not a steak or a piece of swordfish; not ravioli or sugary breakfast cereal.
“My kingdom for a cinnamon danish,” she whispered.
Beside her, Halliwell uttered a bitter bark of a laugh. “I could go for pizza right now. With enough pepperoni to give me a heart attack.”
The disturbing thing was that Julianna felt sure he meant it. Halliwell’s eyes had lost the frantic quality they’d had for quite some time, but now they were simply dull, as though something had gone hollow inside of him. When he implied that he would welcome a heart attack, she knew it was not a joke, though he tried to play it off as one.
“I’m sure we’re almost there, Ted,” she lied.
He gave her a false smile. “Great. And then what?”
Julianna had tried already to lift his spirits, to no avail. She hadn’t the heart or the energy to play the optimist again, so she said nothing.
Kara reached the top of the hill and paused to wait for them. She executed a neat, courtly bow.
Julianna crested the hill and stopped, steadying her breath. Below them were scattered farms and small cottages and a vast lake. And on the hill above the lake, directly across from the one on which they stood, was a walled castle with torchlight burning inside.
Halliwell joined them atop the hill.
“The castle of Otranto, my friends,” Kara said.
“Oh, thank Christ,” Halliwell muttered, and the frantic look was back in his eyes.
Julianna thought that was probably a good thing. She wasn’t sure how much longer Halliwell could go on without snapping—or just shutting down completely. The search for Oliver was the only thing distracting him from the truth of their predicament. Halliwell resolutely refused to believe that they were trapped here. She hesitated to think about what would happen if, when they caught up to Oliver, he confirmed that they could never go home again—that Halliwell would never speak to his daughter again.
For now, she just had to keep him going. As brusque as he had become, Halliwell was a good man. If there was a way to get him home, Julianna hoped they would find it, for both of their sakes. In the meantime, she had to manage him as best she could.
“Time for some answers,” Julianna said.
Halliwell said nothing.
Julianna stared at the archaic outline of that structure upon the hill, and the possibility that Oliver might be inside struck her deeply. If he had come here, if he was still alive, he might well be inside still. What she would say when she saw him, or what any of them would do afterward, she did not know. But she would worry about that later. Right now, just to see him would be enough.
“Let’s go,” she said, starting down the hill.
Halliwell grunted unhappily, but followed. Kara did a cartwheel and then sprang up, leaping and dancing her way down.
It was nearly half an hour before the three of them trudged up to the main gates of the castle. They had not gotten within a hundred feet when the two guards in front of the gatehouse called out to them to halt, and several archers appeared in the embrasures on the battlements above, arrows pointed at the travelers.
“Good evening, friends,” Kara said, bowing with a flourish. Her smile was that of a little girl, but her courtly manner belied her apparent age.
“What do you want, little one?” asked a guard. His fingers flexed upon the grip of his sword but he did not draw the weapon. There was an Asian cast to his features, but the guard beside him had long reddish-blond hair and a thick beard, like some kind of Viking.
Halliwell started to speak, but Kara gestured him to silence and, to his credit, the detective hushed. It surprised Julianna that Halliwell—always curmudgeonly, and, of late, quite brittle—would take instruction from this slip of a girl. But it was clear he had realized she was no ordinary child.
The playful tone and expression disappeared from Kara’s face. This time when she bowed it was only with a nod of the head.
“I am Ngworekara, proud soldiers. My companions and I are weary travelers seeking safe haven for the night. Also, with profound respect, we request an audience with His Highness, King Hunyadi.”
The Viking grunted and his upper lip curled. “It’s a bad night for strangers to visit.”
The other guard, handsome and grim, shot a dark look at the Viking and kept his hand upon the grip of his sword. “Move along, girl. All of you.”
Kara lifted her chin as though she’d been insulted. “Have pity, friends. They have only recently slipped through the Veil and the idea that they can never return home weighs heavily upon them. We are in pursuit of a third, the only friend they have in the Two Kingdoms, himself a recent arrival, and we have reason to believe he has passed this way.”
The handsome guard cocked his head and studied her, then took a hard look at Halliwell and Julianna as well. “What’s his name, this man you pursue?”