Oliver gritted his teeth and shook his head. “I don’t even know what that means.”
Ty’Lis blinked and glanced at him. “No? Truly? None of your myth friends ever told you?”
Unwilling to play along, Oliver looked away, staring instead at Julianna and then at Collette, trying to assure them that everything would be all right. Somehow.
“You and your sister, boy, you’re half of this world and half of that. An uncommon breed, and an unwelcome one.”
Collette screamed at him, “You hideous freak! What the fuck are you talking about?”
Ty’Lis ran his fingers over the braids of his beard. “Idiot girl. You haven’t an inkling, have you?” And now he whispered so that only Oliver could hear, so that none of the soldiers, Atlantean or Yucatazcan, could make out a word.
“We made the Veil to separate the ordinary from the legendary. From time to time, couplings between Borderkind and humans have produced creatures that are both. You are the opposite of the Veil in every way, anathema to the magic used to create it. The stories the Lost Ones tell say that one day a Legend-Born will tear the Veil down, reuniting the two worlds, so that at last they can all go home again.”
Ty’Lis pressed his forehead to Oliver’s, heat pulsing on the sorcerer’s clammy skin, and stared into his eyes.
“That is why you must die. To take away any such false hope. But first, I have need of you…”
Again the sorcerer stepped back and gestured broadly to the king’s guards.
“Put them all in chains,” Ty’Lis commanded. “And I shall attend to the Borderkind. They are under arrest on charges of conspiracy and regicide. You are all witnesses to the crime. You see the Sword of Hunyadi, which was wielded by the hand of this Intruder from beyond the Veil. No other evidence is necessary. He and his companions are assassins, sent by Hunyadi himself.
“The king of Euphrasia has shattered the truce between the Two Kingdoms, and in the name of Mahacuhta, my robes stained with his blood, I swear that Yucatazca shall have her vengeance, that there will be justice.
“That there will be war.”
EPILOGUE
The day after Christmas, Sara Halliwell rode up to Kitteridge with Sheriff Norris. The twenty-sixth of December had always seemed a strange day to her, simmering with the surreal. Many shops remained closed in the morning, so that a drive through Kitteridge gave the impression that the night before had brought some silent apocalypse. People slept in, recovered from the holiday, enjoyed their gifts in quiet solitude as they finished digesting the Christmas feast. Yet the holiday lights were still lit, decorations still hung. No one dared drag their tree to the curb on the day after Christmas. Not yet.
After a day of such passionate celebration, the twenty-sixth of December felt like a national day of mourning.
Fly the flags at half-mast, Sara thought as she gazed out the window of the sheriff’s car at the stillness of the day. Santa’s dead and gone.
By the time Sheriff Norris turned the car onto Rose Ridge Lane, tears made thin tracks down her cheeks. She wiped them away as he pulled into the long driveway of the Bascombe house. This was Sara’s first glimpse of the place and it astonished her. They passed a carriage house, a lovely little cottage larger than the house she’d grown up in, and then the car rolled to a halt in the shadow of what could only be called a mansion. The house itself was painted a light rose and it would have been a thing of beauty if not for the sheer emptiness of it. Like the twenty-sixth of December, the Bascombe house was a monument to what it had lost.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Jackson Norris said.
Again, Sara wiped her eyes. “I really appreciate it.”
“It’s just—” he began, but faltered when he turned to her and saw that she’d been crying.
The sheriff hesitated, then he killed the engine and plucked his keys from the ignition, choosing not to comment on her tears. Sara felt absurdly grateful.
“I don’t know what you expect to find here,” he said.
Sara tucked her hair behind her ears as she bent to look out through the windshield at the magnificent façade of the house. The place looked almost magical, like something out of a storybook.
“I just need to see it.”
Jackson Norris stared at her for another long moment, then nodded and climbed out of the car. Sara got out and closed her door with a soft click, staring at the house even as she followed the sheriff up the walk to the front door.
“The caretaker, or whatever he is, has gone to visit relatives over the holiday,” the sheriff said as he fished out the key he had acquired as part of his investigation. “The guy said he’d be back, but I doubt it. After a little time away, he’s gonna realize he’s got nothing to come back to.”
He unlocked the door and swung it open, then stepped in and glanced around as though worried there might be someone there after all. Or maybe that was just what you did in a house where people had vanished without a trace, and where an unsolved murder had taken place.
Sheriff Norris did not wipe his boots on the mat. He stepped inside and out of the way to let Sara enter. She paused inside the grand foyer to wipe her shoes. As she did, the grandfather clock against the wall to her left began to chime twelve. It was exactly noon.
The sheriff watched her curiously as she started to move through the house. She had promised she would not touch anything, so she kept her hands in her pockets. Though what more the police could learn here, she had no idea. The investigation was not closed, but surely they had finished in the house.
Then again, she was no cop. What did she know?
From room to room she moved, examining the furniture and the paintings on the walls as though she were a thief in the night, or visiting a museum.
How could Jackson Norris possibly understand? Her father had been investigating a mystery and now had become a part of that mystery. She had lost him, somehow, and even more than the fear that they would never talk again, that she would never be able to relinquish all of the love and anger and hurt in her, and never get the embrace that she had always wanted and never dared to hope for…more than that was the fear that she would never know the truth of what had happened to him.
Sara Halliwell was no detective. She could not even begin to imagine what had become of her father, or to hunt for him. Lots of people were already busy doing just that.
But she had to see this place, because this was where it had all begun.
The Bascombe house was the heart of this mystery.
Now, as she walked from room to room, she could almost feel it. There was an elegance to the rooms, but they also had an ethereal quality to them. Something terrible had happened here, but something incredible as well. How did people simply vanish?
As she passed through a sitting room with a fireplace, she saw several framed photographs on the mantel. They were old pictures, including a wedding portrait and several of the family together. Though he was much younger in the photos, she recognized the late Max Bascombe in the wedding photograph right away.
His wife had been beautiful in her white dress, like the snow queen in a fairy tale.
The other photographs were of Mrs. Bascombe with her children, laughing and innocent. They had grown up, those children. Their mother had died when they were young and now their father had been taken from them as well. But what had become of Oliver and Collette Bascombe?
Where are you? Sara thought, staring at the photograph of the two children with their mother.
Fingers on the mantel to steady herself, she closed her eyes. Where are you, Daddy?
In the eastern region of Euphrasia, in the crèche created by the meeting of three mountains, near the entrance to a sprawling pagoda sculpted entirely of sand, a light breeze rose. It stirred and eddied, entirely independent of the winds that swept down from the mountain peaks.
The breeze spun in circles, a small dust devil centered around the scoured bones of Ted Halliwell and the sand and grit that had once constituted two distinct figures, brothers, facets of the same legend. The sand shifted, sculpted now by the wind, and identity became blurred. What had once been the Sandman and what had once been the Dustman could no longer be separated. The sand rose, a little whirlwind, and merged.
Then the bones began to rise as well.
Slowly, grain by grain, the sand and dust and grit touched bone and stuck, gathering gradually around the skeleton. A new figure began to take shape, neither Dustman nor Sandman. It looked a great deal like a dead man named Ted Halliwell and contained within it his thoughts and emotions, his very spirit. But it was only sand, and there were other spirits contained there as well.
One of them a monster.