Lost Ones

CHAPTER 12

S everal minutes after he and Julianna had left the stables on horseback-with Lorenzo leading and Ixchel following-Oliver began to wonder what the hell he’d been thinking. Courage and stupidity could often be confused for one another, and he had a feeling perhaps this was one of those times.

The horses’ hooves clip-clopped on the cobblestones of the narrow, curving street, drawing attention as they passed. At first, no one seemed to make any connection between them and the two prisoners who had escaped the palace dungeon, but then they began to earn strange looks. People whispered to one another when they passed. More than one of the murdered king’s subjects darted off into shadows or back the way they’d come, perhaps hurrying to alert the soldiers that the assassins were trotting down the middle of the road.

Julianna shot Oliver a worried glance. He smiled, faking it badly.

“How far, Lorenzo?” he called.

The professor held up a hand. “Not far.”

Whatever the hell that meant.

Their exchange did not go unnoticed. As soon as Oliver spoke in English, other faces appeared. Shutters opened. An old woman came out on her balcony and stared in such horror it seemed as though the devil himself were passing by. But then two other women-younger, if no prettier-stepped from the darkened interior of a house and started to keep pace with them, hurrying as they followed alongside the horses. A man came out the door of a tavern, eyes widening when he saw them, and popped back inside, shouting. Half a dozen others emerged with him and they, too, fell into step behind the horses.

Children laughed and ran ahead. A young girl-a beautiful creature in the prettiest dress-started to knock on doors as she hurried to keep in front of them. As they entered a wider street, people stood up from the patio of a restaurant and stared. On the corner, a man with a guitar stopped singing in the middle of the song.

A man shouted something at him from the restaurant.

“What was that?” Oliver asked.

“He wants to know if you’re the one, the Legend-Born.”

Oliver gripped the horse’s reins and glanced at Julianna. “Tell him I am.”

Lorenzo beamed. He announced it at the top of his voice.

A cascade of reactions swept around them. Some people laughed. An old man began to cry. Others were not quite so pleased.

A beer glass sailed through the air from the patio. Oliver pulled the horse’s reins taut, stopping the animal just in time. The glass shattered on the cobblestones.

“Murderer!” someone shouted in English.

Other voices were raised as well, and now the crowd began to shout at one another. They spoke different languages, but Oliver understood even those whose words were not in English. Some believed he had come to deliver them home at last and others that he was a fraud and an assassin.

“Ride,” Julianna said.

Oliver spurred his horse and they began to canter down the road. Lorenzo shouted at the people as they passed, loudly announcing his identity. He recognized his name in the flow of the foreign tongue, spoken again and again. Oliver Bascombe. Ixchel joined in, shouting at the crowd, but his voice was joyous. He seemed to be exhorting them to action.

They came to a switchback in the road and took it, slowing only as much as was necessary. A huge crowd now followed, filling the street behind them. Lorenzo rode ahead, leading the way into an even wider road where vendors had set up a market. Fresh fruits and vegetables were on display. Shops with open doors sold hand-sewn leather bags and clothing and marionettes and a hundred other things. A girl with a basket of flowers watched them pass.

The word had preceded them into the market square. People spilled into the streets, gathering on either side to watch them pass.

“The bar is just there, across the square,” Lorenzo called back over the ruckus of the crowd. “Those who are whispering rebellion into the ears of the people must be nearby.”

You hope, Oliver thought. Otherwise, he was about to die.

A group of men and women barred their way. Lorenzo brought his horse to a halt. Oliver’s own mare snorted and reared back before he reined her in. More calls of “Murderer” reached him. Some in the crowd screamed for his blood. He saw the same pretty girl who’d been running ahead of them catch up, her face etched with hatred. She wanted him dead. The idea sickened him.

Oliver sat up straight on his horse and raised both hands to quiet them.

Whether they hailed him or hated him, they complied. Only a low muttering of voices filled the square, now.

“In a few minutes, soldiers are going to try to take us back to the dungeon,” Oliver said, raising his voice so that they could all hear him. Lorenzo translated as he spoke. “I don’t plan to let them do that. The sorcerer, Ty’Lis, has promised to torture and murder the woman I love.”

All eyes shifted to Julianna. She did not shy from them.

“My name is Oliver Bascombe. My father was an ordinary man named Maximilian Bascombe, and my mother was a legend, a Borderkind named Melisande.”

The gasp of the crowd was audible. It had been one thing for them to hope for the truth, but it was another thing entirely for him to confirm it. Catcalls came from the crowd calling him liar and worse. Oliver ignored them.

“If you believe in the Legend-Born or not, that is up to you,” he told them, and Lorenzo continued to repeat his words in the language of Palenque, though many of the people seemed to understand English perfectly well. “I can’t and won’t tell you what to believe, because most of the time, I don’t know myself. So I won’t try to explain what I believe. Instead, I’ll tell you the things I know.

“The High Council of Atlantis wants to seal the Veil forever. On their orders, Ty’Lis sent Myth Hunters out across two worlds to track and murder the Borderkind, and sent the Falconer to murder my sister and me in our home because Atlantis believes that we are Legend-Born, and that we threaten their plans. With help from the Borderkind, we both survived. But the slaughter continued. You see, the High Council had a brilliant plan. If they could kill all of the Borderkind, and us, they could seal the Doors and close off the human world completely.”

He paused, glancing at Julianna again and then surveying the crowd. They were listening. But what could he say? In truth, the king had died by his hand, but it had been the sorcerer’s magic that had led to that tragic moment.

“I carried the Sword of Hunyadi with the blessing of the King of Euphrasia,” Oliver called across the square. “But Hunyadi did not send me here, and I am no assassin. The blood of your king is on Ty’Lis’s hands, not mine. Atlantis has used us all! They want to see the Two Kingdoms torn apart by war so they can come in like vultures and pick at your remains. Now, Ty’Lis has the Sword of Hunyadi hanging on a wall in the palace, and Yucatazcans are killing and dying at the whims of Atlantis!”

Shouts rose. New voices. More people had flooded the square. Something moved on a rooftop and Oliver glanced up to see the strangest creature, a thing that looked as though it were part dog and part monkey, with a grasping claw at the end of its tail. Balconies filled. In the crowd, other legends began to appear-bizarre creatures with the heads of alligators or with mouths where their chests and bellies should be. Snake things slithered over cobblestones. A massive pachyderm stood on two legs at the entrance to a side alley.

“Give us proof!” a voice cried in English.

Before Oliver could say anything, Julianna stood up in her stirrups.

“Proof? What more proof could you want than this?” she demanded, arms thrown wide. Though clean, her hair still looked wild and her exquisite beauty and the edge of her fury made her seem like Eve, freshly evicted from the Garden.

“Oliver could have left Palenque in the middle of the night!” Julianna shouted. “Instead he’s right here, in front of you. Unafraid. Could any of you say you would’ve done the same? Would you have run, or would you have given yourself over to your accusers?”

There’s the lawyer coming out, Oliver thought. And he realized that he had been doing the same thing.

A scuffle started. A monstrous thing with eyes like a spider’s all over its body tried to reach Oliver. Men and women-Lost Ones-intercepted the creature and drove it back. It began to screech, shouting at him in that foreign tongue.

“The Lost Ones want the Veil destroyed,” Lorenzo said, edging his horse closer to Oliver’s. “But most of the legends do not.”

“Is it true?” a voice cried, cutting through the noise.

Oliver glanced up and saw an aging, bearded man on a corner, keeping out of the hot sun in the shade of a bookshop. His clothes made Oliver think that this man had crossed the Veil himself, not descended from some long-ago ancestor who’d come through, and that he might not have been here many years at all.

“Can you really tear it down?” the man called, desperation in his voice and his eyes.

Quiet fell upon the square. Oliver had felt this scrutiny from juries and from theater audiences many times, but it had never mattered this much. Some of what he’d said thus far had been a performance, even a small deception. But now he could not find it in himself to give them anything but honesty.

“I don’t know,” he said, quietly at first, and then he repeated it louder. “I don’t know. I haven’t tried to touch the Veil. My sister and I…there is magic we inherited from our mother, or from whatever magic brought her and my father together. But whether it works that way, I don’t know. I’ll tell you this much, though. Even if we can bring the Veil down, there’s no way in hell we’re going to do it with this war going on. No way.”

An arrow sang through the air and took Lorenzo in the throat.

Julianna screamed.

The professor brought up a hand, eyes wide with surprise, and touched the feathers on the arrow’s shaft even as blood leaked around it. With agonizing slowness, he tumbled from the saddle and fell to the cobblestones. People backed away and he hit the street with a thump.

Oliver spun in his saddle and saw the soldiers. The King’s Guard had been alerted. To his mind, it was a miracle that he’d had the few minutes he did. Perhaps the size of the crowd had slowed them. Soldiers shouted and shoved people out of their way. No doubt they were telling everyone that he had to be arrested on the orders of the king.

Most of the crowd began to back away. But some pushed forward and attacked the soldiers.

Oliver glanced at Julianna. Her expression was grim. Ixchel still held the reins of his horse and gazed numbly down at the corpse of the professor. Not that they could have ridden away now. There were too many people crowded around, and Oliver counted fifteen or twenty soldiers coming up the street. Half a dozen more appeared from a side alley.

“Shit.”

Julianna shot him a look. “Is that the best you can do?”

“You got anything better?”

“Hell, yeah.” Again she stood in her stirrups. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she screamed at the top of her lungs. For a moment, all of the commotion stopped as everyone turned to look at her. Even the soldiers paused.

Julianna pointed at the larger group of soldiers. “Who gave them their orders, today? They’re going to tell you that the king commands them, but where is the king? Who is your king, now? Is it Ty’Lis? Is an Atlantean the king of Yucatazca, now? Or is it Prince Tzajin? Because if Tzajin’s the king, then where is he? His father is murdered and he doesn’t even show up to bury him? He doesn’t come back to Palenque to see to his people and to be crowned king? Bullshit! Tzajin isn’t here because he’s in Atlantis, and they won’t let him come back! So who are these soldiers taking orders from? Who are you all taking orders from now? Atlantis?”

Seconds of silence followed.

Then a massive serpent rose up from the crowd, wrapped around one of the soldiers, and crushed him. Two men fell upon a second and tore off his helmet.

Beneath it were narrow features and greenish-white skin that was almost translucent. The soldier was Atlantean.

A thunderous roar went up from the crowd. Like a wave, they turned on the soldiers. In amongst them, some legends and even some humans fought against the rebellious mob.

“I’m glad I never went up against you in court,” Oliver called to her.

“You should be,” Julianna replied.

Neither of them smiled. Lorenzo had aided them, and now he was dead.

“Ixchel!” Oliver said, yelling to get the man’s attention. “Let’s go!”

He spurred his horse gently, trying to lead the way, to break through the crowd. Getting out of the city remained a priority. He had lit the fuse here in Palenque. The powder keg was exploding, but this wasn’t his battle to fight. It belonged to the subjects of King Mahacuhta. Oliver and Julianna had to get out of Yucatazca and join Hunyadi. More than anything, they had to reconnect with Collette and Frost. Oliver knew his sister would go to Hunyadi as well. If he wanted to see her again, that’s where he would find her. And that’s where the next phase of this war would take place.

As to what that next phase would be-a grim certainty had begun to form in his mind. Oliver Bascombe was no hero, but he had a plan. And for that plan to work, he would need all the help he could get.

The square erupted in chaos. People attacked one another. The soldiers were dragged down. Swords flashed in the sunlight. Oliver closed his eyes against the glare and edged his horse closer to the other side of the square, where the road would eventually lead out of Palenque. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Julianna followed right behind him, and Ixchel behind her.

Then a figure swam up out of the crowd-a creature covered with spider eyes-and grabbed Julianna by the leg. She shouted and kicked out at the monstrosity. Oliver called her name and grabbed the pommel of his saddle, prepared to dismount, knowing only that he had to protect her.

Someone slapped his leg to get his attention.

“That’s enough of that stupidity,” a curt voice said.

Oliver shot a hard look. He blinked in astonishment. For a moment, the face looked unfamiliar, but now he knew it. There were no feathers in that dark hair, but the ragged blue jeans and cowboy boots were still intact.

“Blue Jay!”

The trickster smiled, eyes sparkling with mischief. “Damn good to see you, Oliver. And I’m not alone.”

“How did you find us?”

Blue Jay laughed. “How could we not? You’re not exactly being subtle.”

A shriek went up from behind him and Oliver turned, fear stopping his heart, only to find that the scream had not come from Julianna. The spider-beast stood impaled upon a dozen tall needles of white substance that looked like spun sugar-or spiderweb. On either side of him stood a Mazikeen sorcerer, faces lost beneath their hoods, but a welcome sight just the same.

“Oliver?” Julianna asked.

“They’re friends,” he said.

The relief in her eyes made him realize just how vulnerable they had made themselves.

He turned to look down at Blue Jay. “I assume you can get us out of here?”

Again, the trickster smiled. He shouted something. A small figure dropped from the top of a building and landed on Blue Jay’s shoulder-the weird monkey-dog creature he’d seen before. Several creatures Oliver presumed to be Borderkind started to clear a path. The air in the square rippled with a tremor of magic and several of the people around the horses transformed. One became a long-armed bruiser that Oliver was sure he’d seen before. Another he recognized immediately as the kelpy, Cheval Bayard. Oliver had met Cheval only once, on a night in Twillig’s Gorge when Frost had gathered a handful of Borderkind to discuss striking back at Ty’Lis. Her silver hair gleamed in the sunshine.

Near Julianna’s horse, a glamour was lifted to reveal a short man who seemed to be on fire, his skin blackening and burning, even though he walked calmly alongside them.

There were others. Some kind of cat-men. Tall things with wings and serpentine bodies and long fangs, blood smeared on their faces from where they’d drunk the blood of those who tried to attack them.

The Mazikeen passed Oliver, stepped in front of his horse, and together the two sorcerers gestured. Pushed back by the invisible hands of their magic, the crowd parted.

“Go!” Blue Jay shouted.

Oliver spurred the horse and snapped the reins, then just held on. He heard hoofbeats behind him on the cobblestones. Julianna and Ixchel had been freed from the crowd as well.

Then they were all riding, the Borderkind running and flying and capering beside them, keeping up as they navigated the twists and turns of the labyrinth of Palenque’s streets.

Behind them, the chaos spread. The rebellion had begun.

The coffee had gone cold in Sara Halliwell’s hands. Though she did not look at him, she felt Jackson Norris beside her in the booth at Veronica’s Cafe. The sheriff’s presence lent her some assurance that her mind had not begun to slip. And when his voice chimed in, low and menacing and more than a little bit angry, she could have kissed him, even though he was much too old and male for her.

“You’re talking about fairy tales,” Sheriff Norris said.

Sara didn’t take her eyes off Friedle, partly because she couldn’t believe the words coming out of the man’s mouth, and partly because-as much as she kept telling herself she couldn’t possibly have seen what she thought she had-she wondered if once again the mask of his face would slip, letting her see the ugly, frightening countenance beneath.

Friedle sighed. “Not fairy tales. Not the way that you mean, Sheriff. Honestly, I’m not quite certain which came first-legends or the legendary. Did the stories create us, or did we always exist? Time fades memory, even for ephemeral creatures such as yourselves.”

Her hands clutched the sides of her coffee mug. Sara hadn’t moved in minutes. They’d come all this way, and they had ended up with some fruity nut bar? Friedle paused to scrutinize them, perhaps to see if his words were getting through. Sara glanced at Sheriff Norris, wondering what was going through the mind of her father’s old friend.

Ephemeral creatures?

He means us, she thought. He’s talking about human beings.

Which crystallized the impression he’d been giving all along, talking about them as though they were an entirely different species. They existed on the ordinary side of this thing Friedle called the Veil, and his homeland was on the other. In his version of reality, all of the creatures of myth and legend, as well as all of the civilizations and lands and peoples, had once been a part of the world as Sara knew it. At some point, maybe a thousand years ago-more or less; Friedle wasn’t sure-magic had been used to separate the ordinary from the legendary, to put a barrier up between them and give each their own lands. In the mundane world, humans didn’t remember any of it, except in stories. But sometimes people wandered through to the other side by accident, or were brought through.

He’d also talked about legends called Borderkind, who could pierce the Veil at will, and humans called Lost Ones, who were trapped on the legendary side. People in the cafe went about their business. The waitress refilled coffee cups and brought lunch to various tables. A couple of fortyish moms chatted at the next booth, happy to have a day without their kids, and paid no attention at all to the insanity unfolding right beside them.

Then, to Sara’s astonishment, the story had become even crazier. Friedle believed that Oliver and Collette Bascombe had been abducted by creatures from across the Veil, and that Sara’s father and Julianna Whitney had tried to follow them and gotten trapped on the other side. Lost.

She shook her head, staring at the man. “How the hell did you manage to run a household for the Bascombes with all of this stuff in your head?”

The words came out before she could stop them, but she did manage to plug in “stuff” instead of “lunacy” or “crazy shit.”

Friedle arched an eyebrow. “Please, Miss Halliwell. I understand that you’re distraught. I’m merely giving you what you came here for. You wanted to know what happened to your father, and I’m giving you the answer. When I’ve finished, if you’ve got a theory that fits the facts more than the truth I’m sharing with you, I’m quite certain you’ll ignore anything I’ve said that doesn’t fit within your worldview.”

Stung, Sara stared at him. In all her life, no one had ever accused her of having a narrow worldview. With her lifestyle, openness and acceptance usually came with the territory. So many people were cruel and intolerant to her, the last thing she wanted was to do the same. But either Friedle had a genuine mental disorder or he was fucking with them.

I don’t need this.

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that some or all of this is true,” Sheriff Norris began.

Sara shot him a dark look. “You can’t be serious, Jackson.”

He quieted her with a glance. She relented. He was the cop. Maybe he approached lunacy with a different attitude. Or maybe he thought there was still something they could learn from Marc Friedle.

“It is,” the man replied.

“All right,” Jackson agreed. “You still haven’t explained who you are, and what you have to do with the Bascombes, and why they were abducted and their father was murdered. Care to shed light on any of these things?”

The little man sat straighter, a glint in his eyes. Something dark flashed there and Sara winced, remembering the frightening face she’d thought she had seen when he had first turned toward them out on the sidewalk. It had been a trick of light and shadow, or of her own imagination, of course. He seemed nothing but ordinary now. That fidgety normalcy made his story even more ridiculous.

Now, though, his eyes took on a kind of ancient wisdom that belied his features, and he did not seem quite so ordinary.

“For more than two hundred years, I served in the house of Melisande. Most times, she was a creature of rare elegance and beauty, but when her mood turned dark or she yearned for the water, the lower half of her body became that of a serpent. When the Veil was raised she became Borderkind, and could travel with ease between this world and that, and sometimes I traveled with her.

“My true name is Robiquet,” he said. “And my true face is something you do not wish to see.”

When he spoke those words, he looked hard at Sara as though they were meant for her. She flinched. Had she really seen something, then?

No. It’s just grief and hope and confusion. This can’t be true. It couldn’t be, because if she believed this little part of what Friedle-or Robiquet or whoever-was telling her, then she had to believe everything. And she couldn’t do that.

Friedle smiled. His teeth were small and sharp. “I’m a goblin. What you see is a glamour, magic that Melisande gave me long ago.”

Something shattered in the kitchen-a dropped glass or plate-and Friedle clapped his hands over his ears, a sudden flash of terror and pain in his eyes. Then he took a deep breath, squeezing his eyes closed, and when he opened them he wore the most sheepish expression, so that she could not help feeling sorry for him.

“Breaking glass,” he said, and then shuddered, as though that was explanation enough. “Just can’t abide the sound.”

“So, this Melisande?” Sheriff Norris prompted, like this was any other investigation and Friedle just a typical informant.

The little man nodded. He went on at length about Melisande, but Sara found herself only half listening. Despite how unsettled she’d been out on the sidewalk, she studied his face, trying to imagine the features of the other one she’d imagined she’d seen. What had happened at that moment, when they had come up behind him?

“-introduced Melisande to Maximilian Bascombe. I’d always loved the ordinary folk and visited whenever I could. Melisande came to love you people as well, and this world, and more and more we would journey here amongst you. Many Borderkind did. Some still do. There are places we meet, taverns and inns and baseball parks and such.”

For once, the sheriff seemed taken by surprise. He held up a hand, chuckling and shaking his head.

“Baseball parks?”

Friedle frowned deeply and stared at him, eyes so dark that Sara thought she might be seeing the goblin underneath. “We love baseball.”

The sheriff wasn’t smiling anymore. “Right. Sorry. I may have read that somewhere, actually.”

That made Friedle’s mood lighten. “Quite possible. You love to write about us. Always have. Even before the Veil went up.”

He brushed at the air as though erasing the tangent the conversation had taken. “In any case, Wayland Smith introduced Melisande and Max.”

“Who’s this Smith?”

Friedle seemed almost surprised that they had to ask.

“Wayland Smith. The Wayfarer? Traveler, some call him. One of a kind. I suppose he’s a legend, but there’s more to it than that. Rumors abound. No one’s precisely certain who he is or where he comes from, but he walks between worlds easily enough. Melisande encountered him while in this world and he brought her to a masquerade. Max was a very serious man, even then, but he loved to dance. They fell in love that night-genuine love, though some say such a thing is impossible between the ordinary and the legendary. But how could it have been anything else? She gave up her world for him, surrendered to everything ordinary.”

“Meaning what?” Sheriff Norris asked.

“Well, she didn’t look human, did she? Not in her natural form. To remain with him, she wanted to permanently alter her appearance, to become human in all ways. Smith aided her, and there was a magician who helped. Melisande had lived centuries as a creature of beauty and mystery, and she gave all of that up for love. She could no longer travel beyond the Veil. Oh, she could still sense the nearness of the legendary world, but if she had crossed over, the magic would unravel and she would return to her mythical appearance, perhaps forever. That was just as well, because she bore her husband children, and the legendary would have killed them on sight, had they known about them.”

“What? Why?” Sara asked.

The waitress arrived. The three of them fell silent.

“Get you folks anything else?”

Sara smiled. “My coffee’s gone cold. Could I get another cup?”

The waitress held up a finger, took a few steps over to the coffee station, and returned with a clean cup and a carafe. She filled it up and Sara wrapped her hands around the mug, grateful for the warmth that flooded into her and the aroma that seemed to clear her senses.

“Anyone else?”

“I think we’re set,” Sheriff Norris replied, and the woman scribbled something on their bill, left it on the table, and sailed away. She hadn’t given them so much as a glimpse of personality thus far, and Sara doubted she would reveal one.

When the waitress was gone, she and the sheriff stared at Friedle-or Robiquet, if that was his name.

“Why would the Bascombe children be killed?”

Again, Friedle gave them that look, the one that said these were all things everyone should know.

“They’re half-human and half-Borderkind. Legend-Born, we call that on the other side. The Lost Ones believe that someday a child born of human and Borderkind will tear down the Veil and they’ll be able to return to this world again.”

Sheriff Norris massaged his temple, as if he had a massive headache coming on. “Hold on. If there are people on the other side-the Lost Ones you keep talking about-there must have been other children that were half-human, or whatever.”

Friedle nodded. “Certainly. But the Lost Ones have already been touched by the magic of the Veil. For a child to be Legend-Born, the human parent has to have been born on this side, of entirely ordinary heritage. Max Bascombe had never been touched by magic before Melisande came along, I can assure you of that.”

“But Oliver and Collette can’t be the first ones,” Sara said.

“No. Sometimes they’ve been killed. Other times they’ve lived out their lives undiscovered. But as far as I know, Melisande’s children are the first ever to cross the Veil.”

“So you believe they’re supposed to fulfill some kind of prophecy?” Sara asked.

“I do. Most of the Lost Ones believe it, of course. And I suppose the legendary believe as well, or they wouldn’t be so afraid of a half-breed being born. Wayland Smith knew it, of course, when he introduced Melisande to Max Bascombe. But by the time Max learned that his children would be seen as saviors by some and a threat by others, his wife was already dead.”

Emotion strained his voice when he said this last and he had to look away a moment.

“Max hated us all, after that. The Veil. Legends. Magic. Anything of the sort, and Smith most of all. He blamed the Wayfarer for not telling him the truth before he and Melisande had children. Max feared for them. He kept me around because his wife had been fond of me and because he thought I could help him if Oliver and Collette exhibited any strange behavior or physical attributes. He grieved horribly, and at the same time, he worked to extinguish any spark of legend in his children, so that they would never wander afar, never discover what they were, never be revealed to those who would do them harm. He failed, of course. And I failed. I promised Wayland Smith I’d look out for Melisande, and then I promised her that I would look after her children if anything happened to her. I failed them all.

“I don’t know how they learned of Oliver and Collette’s existence. The only one who knew of them was Wayland Smith, and he’d practically orchestrated their parents’ meeting, so he’d have no reason to expose the truth.

“But someone knew. Someone who wanted them destroyed. The Sandman came to kill them-killed Max and took his eyes, and lots of others after him, since someone was stupid enough to free him. Now they’re both across the Veil, on the run-if they’re even still alive-and Julianna and Detective Halliwell, your father, miss, are trapped there.”

Sara found she had been holding her breath. She trembled a bit as she inhaled. “Trapped for now, you mean. If all of this is true…if any of it is true…then the Veil might not last forever.”

Friedle nodded, practically bowing his head. “As you say.”

“Sara?”

Sheriff Norris had turned to stare at her.

“What?”

A cop wouldn’t speak his mind while the object of his investigation was sitting right there in the booth with them. Sara knew that. The fact that he’d questioned her at all with Friedle present had been a lapse and now Jackson tried to wave it away. But Sara knew what that one word-her name-had been asking. She understood the question. Was she buying any of this? And if she was buying it, was that only because it gave her hope that her father hadn’t been murdered, that whoever had torn out Max Bascombe’s eyes hadn’t done the same to her dad, and left him lying in a ditch somewhere?

Sara stared at the sheriff. “You’ve got a hundred little mysteries wrapped up in this case, Jackson. You and the FBI and the police and governments in half a dozen countries. All this stuff is connected. You know it is. And you all know-every goddamn one of you knows-that you’re not going to find the answers to any of them. If you were going to, you would’ve figured it out already. You think about those mysteries, Oliver popping up in foreign countries with no record of travel, the kids all over the world killed the same way as Max Bascombe, what happened on that island in Scotland, and dozens of other little questions-and you tell me this…can you explain any of them? Even one?”

Sheriff Norris stared at her a moment, shifted his gaze to Marc Friedle, and then looked at her again. “You know I can’t.”

“But the story we just heard explains them all.”

“It’s impossible, Sara. All of it.”

She couldn’t argue the point. The sheriff was right. Impossible. But the story they’d heard was also the only thing so far that seemed to make any sense.

“Maybe when the questions are impossible to answer, that’s because the answers themselves are impossible,” she whispered.

Friedle smiled.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “When we first came up behind you on the sidewalk and you turned around, you said something about somebody finally coming for you. But you said ‘us.’ Who’s us?”

His smile faded. He looked around, as though despite all of the wild things he had told them, this was the one thing he did not want anyone else to overhear.

“Some of us-Borderkind-we don’t ever want to go back. We want to live here forever, in the ordinary world. We like it here. But whoever wanted the Bascombes has been sending Hunters into this world, killing my kind. After what happened in Maine, I came down here to stay with friends. All of us at Bullfinch’s, we’re Borderkind. I thought you were Hunters, come for us.”

Sara studied him. “So you have this other face; your real face.”

Friedle glanced away, perhaps ashamed of his true self. “Of course.”

“Can we see it, just for a moment? Just so we know what’s real?”

“Here?” he asked, glancing around.

Sara looked at Sheriff Norris. He seemed genuinely baffled, but he focused expectantly on Friedle.

“Here,” she confirmed.

The glamour dropped for a single eye blink, but that was enough. The waitress screamed, then looked embarrassed at the attention she had brought upon herself. Confused, she kept looking over at them, trying without luck to confirm that she hadn’t had a hallucination.

Sara looked at the sheriff, but Jackson only stared at the goblin sitting across from him.

“All right,” Sheriff Norris said. “What now?”

“What do you mean?” Robiquet asked.

“You made a promise. You screwed up. But as far as you know, Melisande’s children are still alive. We want to find them, and Julianna and Sara’s father, too. You said there were Doors.”

The human-faced goblin shook his head. “Oh, no. The Doors are always under guard.”

Sheriff Norris smiled thinly, a little bit of strain around his eyes. His understanding of the world had just been broken into pieces, so Sara didn’t blame him. She knew she must look much the same, but her own worldview had been shattered slowly, over the weeks since her father had vanished and she’d had to come to terms with the possibility he might never return and she might never know his fate.

Maybe that had changed.

“Under guard?”

Robiquet nodded.

The sheriff left forty dollars on the table to cover their lunch and stood up. He glanced at Sara, then at the goblin.

“That’s what guns are for.”