Lost Ones

CHAPTER 23

The world blurred around Julianna. Sounds seemed to run together. She whipped around, catching sight of trees and the sun-baked rocks. Collette rushed up and planted a hand between her shoulder blades, and Julianna stumbled. Her legs caught up to her momentum and she ran uphill, toward the top of the ridge with Collette at her side, propelling her along. Both of them were staggering, mouths drawn back in pain as they ignored the wounds the Atlantean assassin had given them.

Run or die. Julianna knew that no third choice existed.

“You won’t get far!” the assassin shouted after them.

Julianna could feel him in pursuit. She did not dare turn to look. Sound washed over her, but in its midst she felt sure she heard his boots pounding the hill, closing in. Collette seemed almost to be falling uphill.

A numbness came over Julianna. Cold certainty that she would not be alive when and if Oliver returned.

Somehow that woke her. Her pulse thundered in her ears and her throat closed with dust and heat and fear. Collette faltered, nearly fell, but Julianna grabbed her hand and hauled her up and onward. She slid a hand behind Collette’s back and practically dragged her over the top of the ridge.

She had a glimpse of the Euphrasian encampment, of the colors flying over King Hunyadi’s tent, and of the battlefield far below. Then she turned her ankle, struggled to catch herself, but fell, and she and Collette were crashing to the ground again together, tumbling. Sharp, dry grass prickled her skin and jabbed the wounds on her face and throat. White lights exploded at the corners of her vision and for a moment the world blurred again and she thought she would pass out.

Then the assassin fell upon her. Julianna wished she still had the ogre’s hammer, and room to swing it. But the assassin sneered at her and grabbed a fistful of her hair, dragging her upward. She cried out and struggled to stand, so that her scalp would not tear.

“Ty’Lis said nothing about killing you,” the Atlantean said. “But you hurt me, and I pay what’s due.”

Collette started to rise, moving toward him. Julianna saw her out of the corner of her eye. The assassin seemed not to notice, or care.

Shouts went up from the encampment. They were fifty yards from the wounded soldiers, and those not so badly injured began to rise, painfully, intent upon stopping the inevitable. There simply wasn’t time.

Julianna screamed.

As the echo carried across the camp, something else moved at the edge of her vision, too close and too swift to be Collette. With a fistful of her hair, the assassin clasped the other hand around her throat and began to choke her.

The shadow became solid.

A hand thrust past Julianna, gripped the assassin by the neck, and hoisted him off the ground. He let go of her hair as he twisted and fought, kicking at the tall figure in its dark hood and cloak. His fingers pulled away the hood and Julianna knew what she would see-the hideous, lemon eyes of the Sandman.

How it could be, she did not know. Kitsune had warned them, but she had seen the Sandman and his brother, the Dustman, die with Ted Halliwell.

The Sandman pulled the struggling assassin to him and put the other hand over his face, smothering him. His palm sealed the assassin’s mouth-he clawed at the hand suffocating him, to no avail. Sand spilled from the assassin’s nostrils. His eyes were wide and frantic, but in seconds his struggles slowed and then ceased completely.

The monster let the assassin’s corpse fall to the ground. Then the Sandman bent, grabbed his head in both hands, and twisted it, breaking his neck with the snap of dry kindling.

“Julianna, run!” Collette shouted.

But she could not. At best, she had time to stagger back a few steps before the monster murdered her as well. Yet when the Sandman turned toward her, he made no move to attack.

The sand of his features re-formed itself, flowing and sifting. His cloak became a jacket. Julianna shook her head in disbelief. The Sandman and Dustman had destroyed one another, the substance of their bodies merged forever on that eastern mountain plateau with the bones of Ted Halliwell.

But she stared, now, into Halliwell’s face. Sculpted of sand, yes, and with the bowler hat and thick mustache of the Dustman, but she would know the detective anywhere. They had spent weeks together, searching for Oliver, searching for answers, trying to find a way home. Sometimes they had been friends, and sometimes strangers. But she knew him.

The eyes were his.

“Ted?”

This Halliwell-the creature of dust and sand-nodded.

“Julianna?” Collette ventured, coming closer, moving around to stand almost beside her, staring. When she inhaled sharply, Julianna knew she had recognized him as well.

“How?” Julianna asked.

The Dustman shrugged. “Some things are impossible. Doesn’t mean they aren’t real. We learned that one, didn’t we?”

A hand fluttered to her mouth. A kind of giddy relief went through her, despite all the horror that continued there in that place of war. Ted Halliwell had died before her eyes, but somehow he lived.

He lifted his gaze to her and one side of his mouth lifted in an odd grin, twitching his mustache. “I made it home. I saw her. I can go to Sara any time I want, now.”

Bittersweet tears threatened at the corners of her eyes. She felt so happy for him, but a sour knot twisted in her gut. Ted had died, but somehow it had freed him of this place. Julianna could never leave. And if dying was the price, she didn’t think she could pay.

“That’s wonderful,” she said.

But his eyes narrowed. He saw her pain, and understood.

“I wanted to come back, though. Had to make sure you were all right. That Hunyadi didn’t lose his throne.”

Collette glanced down at the assassin’s corpse. “That’s what you came back for? Justice?”

“Once a cop…” the Dustman replied, with Ted Halliwell’s voice.

Footsteps came from behind them. Julianna and Collette turned to see a wounded man come around the side of King Hunyadi’s tent. He had a hand over his stomach, blood soaking his bandages. In the other hand he carried a long dagger.

“Justice?” the man said, the word barely more than a grunt. “What does a monster know of justice?”

Collette grabbed Julianna’s arm, tried to pull her back. “Who the hell is this?”

Julianna blinked. The grim man’s face was familiar, but it took her a moment to place him. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she and Halliwell had sat on the patio at the cafe in Twillig’s Gorge, where they’d met Ovid Tsing for the first time.

“Mister Tsing-”

Ovid stalked toward Halliwell. He pointed with the dagger.

“You murdered my mother, detective.”

Halliwell flinched. “The Sandman-”

“No!” Ovid snapped. “I saw your face. I remembered you. You plucked out her eyes, and you ate them, and you smiled at me!”

Julianna froze.

The Dustman shook his head, and the sand sifted again, and now he was just Ted Halliwell. Still made of sand, but no bowler, no mustache, no coat. Just that cantankerous, aging cop who loved his daughter with his whole being.

Ovid lunged.

Halliwell did not move. He let the dagger come.

“No!” Julianna screamed, putting herself between them.

She felt Collette grab at her arm, trying to stop her, but the dagger plunged into her abdomen. All the breath rushed from her in a hiss of air and her body went rigid. Her eyes widened and she stared into Ovid Tsing’s face in surprise, then fell to her knees.

A flash of regret was the only sign that Ovid even noticed he had stabbed her.

Collette screamed her name and went to her, lifting up her head and talking to her. Julianna could barely hear the words. Collette pressed a hand against the knife wound, trying to stanch the bleeding, and then she began tearing at Julianna’s shirt.

But Julianna only stared at Ovid, the man who’d done it to her, and who advanced on the Dustman yet again.

Halliwell let him come.

“I’m sorry,” Ted said with sorrowful eyes. “I couldn’t stop him. I was…the Sandman kept me trapped inside and I couldn’t get out. I’m so sorry.”

He kept apologizing even as Ovid plunged the dagger into him again and again, stabbing his chest and neck and even his face. The blade slid in and out of the sand with a dry shushing. Ovid screamed and stabbed harder, gripping the dagger in both hands.

Halliwell had become the Dustman again, but still had those grieving eyes.

Ovid fell to the ground, the wound in his abdomen leaking blood badly now. Julianna saw that he had stabbed her in almost the precise spot where he himself had been injured.

He wept in frustration and helplessness.

Julianna looked up at Halliwell. He started toward her. His lips formed words of concern. Her head lolled to one side, and she looked up at Collette and smiled.

A single voice cut through the cloud of shock that had enveloped her.

“If you’d stayed in the dungeon, you’d have saved us all a great deal of trouble.”

The shadows cleared from her vision for just a moment and she shifted her gaze to see the pale face of Ty’Lis only a few feet away, hateful features framed by that yellow hair. His robes moved as though in some breeze that Julianna could not feel. The sorcerer had come for them. For Collette. For the Legend-Born.

Oliver, Julianna thought, wishing for him, as though upon a star.

Then she slipped away, into the darkness.

With the warmth of Kitsune’s body in his arms and her blood soaking into his shirt, Oliver stared at the figures floating in the air around the ice mountain Frost had made. Atlantis trembled, the water surged upward, now only ten or eleven feet below him. The winter man stood on a higher peak, the dead blue bird in his hands, and Leicester Grindylow beside him carrying the body of Cheval Bayard.

“They’re all Smith,” Oliver said.

He stared around at them-the giant and the female, the fearsome warrior, the scarred monstrosity, the thin wizard-and knew it had to be true. Each one of those figures, somehow, was the Wayfarer.

“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked Frost.

The winter man had become a jagged skeleton of ice. He shook his head, mystified.

Oliver turned his focus to the aged, withered Smith whose left eye socket was a scarred pit. At first, he’d thought this the Wayland Smith he knew, but then the others had come.

“What the hell is this?”

Another building crumbled. The ground shook and Oliver nearly fell, then. He clutched the bleeding fox against his chest. If it came to that, he would fall into the churning floodwaters before he would let her go to her death alone.

A strange calm settled upon him. The soldiers of Atlantis had been washed away, save for those who had sought higher ground on roofs and domes and could only wait to die. Some leaped off, diving into the water, taking their chances with the ocean, perhaps in hopes that they might find a boat or something to float on. Or perhaps they could breathe in the water. The people of Atlantis were not human, at least not by Oliver’s reckoning.

The sorcerers were gone as well. He imagined they were not drowned, but instead had fled the destruction of their kingdom.

Some of the creatures-the monstrous sea-beasts that the sorcerers had commanded-still darted through the air above the sinking island, but they paid no more attention to Oliver and the Borderkind, or to these new intruders. Whatever malign intelligence had commanded the octopuses and air sharks, or whatever training they’d received, the chaos had them confused and panicked.

Oliver stared at the one-eyed Smith and waited for an answer.

“Damn you, where is he?” Frost said, his voice a kind of hiss. “Where is the Wayfarer?”

The question seemed foolish. The look on the one-eyed Smith’s face told Oliver precisely how foolish it was. The female actually laughed, softly. The giant Smith cursed and spat.

“The Wayland you knew has…” the one-eyed Smith began, then faltered. He shook his head, as though deciding not to share whatever he had been about to say. “He has done something that we Wayfarers have all agreed never to do. We are Travelers, Oliver Bascombe. Walkers between worlds. We are not meant to interfere with those worlds we visit, for they are not our own. Yet our brother-your Wayland-has shown us that there are times when it is not possible to stand aside, when we must become involved.

“Every world has a Wayfarer. This dimension’s Wayland was weakened by the creation of the Veil-”

The others began to shout him down. Chagrined, the one-eyed Smith held up a hand and nodded, and his siblings fell silent.

“We need him back,” Oliver said. Nothing else mattered, now. Confusion threatened to distract him, but he had to keep his focus. “He brought us here through the Gray Corridor, and we have to return to the battlefield. Ty’Lis-the murderous, twisted son of a bitch responsible for all of this-he’s there, and I think he means to kill my sister, and King Hunyadi.”

But the one-eyed Smith only shook his head. “He cannot return. His power has failed at last. The Veil holds him back, trapped in the Gray.”

The winter man seemed somehow stronger. Some of the ice in the mountain blew up into snow and accumulated around him.

“Then you must take us!” Frost demanded. “If his interference stranded us here, you must balance the scales.”

The one-eyed Smith glanced around at the others. They all began to nod, slowly, and as the old, withered Wayfarer turned to look at Oliver again, one by one they began to fade to gray, to wisps of nothing.

Oliver’s heart sank and he buried his face in Kitsune’s copper fur.

Only then did he notice that all had gone silent.

He raised his eyes and saw Frost and Grin there in the mists of the Gray Corridor beside him, bearing their dead. Oliver felt the fox’s weak heartbeat pulsing against him as he looked around.

“Which way?”

Then he saw the figure, there in the mist, ahead of them on the path. A figure with a broad-brimmed hat and a cane with a brass head. The figure said nothing, but started along the path.

In the mists on either side, other figures moved.

Other Wayfarers.

It seemed the wind was at his back, and the mist rushed past as though they were flying, hurtling along the Gray Corridor.

The Wayfarers vanished.

Oliver paused, looking around, panic seizing him. Frost and Grin began to call for Smith.

The gray mist faded.

“This way,” Oliver said.

“How do you know?” Grin asked.

“I just…I feel it.”

In three steps, they emerged from the Gray Corridor and found themselves on the hill above the battlefield, within sight of the wounded being doctored and the dead where they lay stacked like cordwood, and the tents of the King and his officers.

And Oliver heard his sister scream.

Ty’Lis opened his cloak.

Collette stared a moment and then a hand flew to her mouth as she retched. She wished she could look away, but knew it might cost her life. Beneath the cloak, the sorcerer wore nothing save a wrap that covered his genitals. Even so, only small strips of his greenish-white flesh were revealed. The rest of his bony body pulsed with living things, bulbous, translucent creatures with masses of long tendrils. They might have been jellyfish, but Collette had never seen jellyfish like this before. They were suctioned to the sorcerer’s flesh, and she felt sure the traces of green that seemed to swirl inside of their bodies were the blood of Ty’Lis.

In her arms, Julianna had fallen unconscious. A coldness came over Collette’s heart, and she felt as though some hard shell covered her.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Ty’Lis asked, and from his thin smile, she knew he meant those words.

Ovid Tsing remained on his knees, clutching his wound with one hand and his dagger in the other. Collette snapped at him, said his name, and the man looked up with eyes so lost she doubted he would ever find his way again. Right then, she didn’t care. She needed him.

“Watch over her,” Collette said, pointing to Julianna. “You owe her that.”

Ovid began to crawl toward Julianna.

Collette glanced at the Dustman-at the legend Ted Halliwell had become-and saw that his eyes glowed with a golden light. She wondered if that was a good thing, or if the monster had emerged from within him again.

The Dustman said her name, raising a finger and pointing past her.

The jellyfish had begun to detach themselves from Ty’Lis’s body. One by one they pulled away with an obscene sucking noise, leaving behind small, throbbing holes in the sorcerer’s flesh.

They darted through the air, trailing tendrils. Ty’Lis wore a cadaverous grin and he flicked his fingers outward as though orchestrating their every move.

Weaponless, and with only the power in her hands, she knew she had to get in close. Collette lunged at him. One of the jellyfish lashed at her arm with its tendrils, a dozen searing lines upon her flesh. It attached to her skin and she felt something puncture her arm, felt something wriggling into the hole it had made.

She screamed in revulsion and panic, but she reached for the sorcerer just the same.

Powerful hands gripped her shoulders from behind, and then her feet lifted off the ground. The Dustman hurled her away to tumble across the rough hillside, coming to rest only inches from the dead assassin.

Collette scrabbled to her feet, chest heaving. Her arm burned where the jellyfish was wrapped around her. Retching again, she forced herself to get control and tried to scrape the thing off against the dirt and grass. Its tendrils tore free, leaving stinging red welts behind, but whatever proboscis it had thrust into her arm could not be so easily dislodged. She grabbed it with her free hand and pulled it loose, screaming again as it tore skin and tugged on muscle. Then it was out, and she was bleeding. She tested her arm and hand. Everything still worked.

Enraged, she rose and saw the Dustman moving toward Ty’Lis in a cloud. Sand and grit swirled in the air, dragging jellyfish down and smearing them on the ground. Others flew right at the Dustman, trying to latch onto his sifting, shifting form, only to be scoured away. Petite as she was, still it unsettled her to have been cast off like some discarded toy. But Collette figured the Dustman had earned her forgiveness.

Then Ovid cried out, and she saw that the Sandman had not gotten them all. Jellyfish had descended upon him and Julianna. Tendrils rose and fell in the air, whipping their exposed flesh. One of the things had attached itself to the back of Ovid’s neck. The young warrior did nothing to try to remove it. Instead, he spread himself out over Julianna, trying to save the life of the woman he’d stabbed only moments before. Most of the creatures were attacking him.

“I freed you!” Ty’Lis screamed. “How dare you interfere?”

The Dustman had gone away. Ted Halliwell had gone away. The thing that attacked Ty’Lis now appeared to be the Sandman, through and through. The gray hooded thing with those finger knives seemed almost to glide along the ground, reaching for the sorcerer.

Not the Sandman, Collette thought. It’s Ted, still, somehow. In there, it’s Halliwell, or he wouldn’t be helping.

Adrenaline surged through her, but she thought something else moved through her veins as well. Her body trembled with the urge to act, with the power to do something. But Halliwell would destroy the sorcerer, certainly.

Even as the thought entered her mind, Ty’Lis raised his hands. From the holes where the jellyfish had been feeding upon his blood, streams of liquid shadow erupted, blackness that seemed to eclipse the sunlight around them. Like the tendrils of the jellyfish, they whipped through the air and wrapped around the Sandman, but these were not physical things like the jellyfish. They were forged of the dark magic of Ty’Lis.

The Sandman staggered, struggled. His form changed, shifted, sifting to the Dustman and then to Halliwell. The sand began to slip through those tendrils of darkness, flowing toward the sorcerer, scouring Ty’Lis’s face, tearing the flesh.

The air seemed to compress between them and then it burst in a brilliant scarlet light, an eruption of magic that blew Halliwell off of his feet. The sand creature struck the ground and shattered, sand and dust and grit spraying all over the hill.

Ty’Lis did not so much as look away.

The Sandman began to draw himself together. The sorcerer had expected it. Those black tendrils tore at the remains of the monster, of Halliwell, pulling him apart as he tried to repair himself. Ty’Lis threw back his head, jaws opening impossibly wide, unhinging, and something began to push itself up from within, wet and spiny, a gleaming carapace, a creature from the depths of the sea.

It stripped off the flesh of Ty’Lis as easily as removing a coat.

Collette could not breathe. Altanteans could not all be these creatures. So what the hell was it? A parasite? Or was this simply what the sorcerers of Atlantis became, within?

As Halliwell fought against the magic of that ocean sorcerer, the creature turned to look at her, and those piss-yellow eyes were the same. This was no parasite. She stared into the true face of Ty’Lis.

And he stared back at her.

Collette’s hands flexed emptily.

Turning, stumbling on her injured leg and with the pain in her arm screaming in her brain, she stagger-ran to the top of the ridge, practically threw herself between a pair of trees, and went sprawling on her hands and knees, headfirst down the other side.

When she picked up her head, she saw the war-hammer Julianna had hit the assassin with. She scrambled over to it and picked it up in both hands. Collette had never been especially strong. All her life she’d been teased-sometimes lightheartedly and sometimes cruelly-for her size. When she met children, sometimes as young as twelve, who were taller than she was, invariably she would blush, feeling awkward.

The war-hammer seemed no heavier than a baseball bat in her hands.

Collette started back over the ridge.

Oliver and the winter man ran side by side. The temperature here was perhaps fifteen degrees cooler than on Atlantis, but the air hung thick with humidity, and Frost had almost instantly accumulated that moisture to repair himself. His icy figure remained sharp and thin, but no longer the skeletal shape he had become.

They weaved through the wounded, Oliver leaping a man who howled for the doctor, raising the stump of a ruined arm. Frost disintegrated into the air, becoming the churning blizzard Oliver had first encountered a lifetime ago in his mother’s parlor on that stormy December night.

Grin had been left to look after Kitsune-still in her fox shape-and the cooling corpses of Cheval and Blue Jay. Oliver and Frost were the only ones left to fight Ty’Lis, and somehow, despite the mistrust and resentment that had come between them, that seemed right.

They reached the tents of King Hunyadi and his entourage. Oliver kept his focus on the flag flying the king’s banner. He dodged around a tent and then emerged at the rear of the camp, a stone’s throw from the top of the ridge. The Sword of Hunyadi felt right and comfortable in his hand.

When he saw the monsters fighting, his first thought was that two of the legends involved in the war had somehow carried their conflict far from the field of battle. The thing still on its feet had a hard ridged shell like some kind of crustacean, black and wetly gleaming. Ribbons of oily shadow extruded from small holes all over its body, and Oliver had seen dark tendrils like that before. Atlantean sorcery.

But there was no sign of Collette, and that was a good sign.

The ocean creature attacked something else that struggled to rise from the ground, those oily ribbons whipping and tearing, but as Oliver ran-the blizzard of the winter man rushing along beside him-he realized what he saw was the Sandman. The monster’s substance thrashed against those black ribbons, which somehow had power over the shifting sand.

“Magic,” he grunted, breath coming raggedly as he ran. “Ty’Lis can’t be far.”

“ That is Ty’Lis, ” whispered a cold breeze at his ear. “ Dark sorcery, Oliver. He’s transformed himself into a Curlesh, a legend from ancient Atlantis.”

“Why the hell would he-”

“ Harder to kill, ” the icy breeze replied.

But Oliver had stopped listening. As they neared the stretch of rough ground where Ty’Lis and the Sandman fought, he saw two human figures on the grass, covered in the same sickening jellyfish they had barely escaped in Atlantis. A man lay atop a woman, and the disgusting things covered nearly all of the man’s body and lashed at the exposed flesh of the woman he shielded.

Oliver would have known her in a darkened room, or across a crowd of thousands. He knew her now. Julianna’s hair. Her hands. The slope of her jaw, where only a tiny bit of her face was visible. He knew her better than he did himself.

“What have you done?” he screamed.

The Curlesh turned at his voice. The Sandman partially slipped his bonds and a long arm sculpted of sand lashed up, driving finger knives at the eyes of the sorcerer Ty’Lis. The Curlesh dodged its head and its shadow tendrils tore the Sandman’s arm apart, but by then, Oliver and Frost were nearly upon them. He didn’t know where his sister was, but as long as Collette was elsewhere, she would be safe.

Those piss-yellow eyes turned toward Oliver again. Ty’Lis raised his monstrous hand.

“You should be dead!” the sorcerer shouted.

A rush of turquoise light burst from his fingers and shot toward Oliver, who had no defense against magic. In that very instant, the winter man took form in front of him, ice and snow carved into the body of Frost. Ty’Lis’s spell struck him and Frost melted on contact, turning to a cascade of water that splashed to the rough grass with the stink of the ocean at low tide.

“Son of a bitch!” Oliver roared, raising the sword and charging right across the puddle that Frost had become. “ I should be dead? You should be dead!”

He brought Hunyadi’s blade around in an arc with a speed and a strength he knew were inhuman. The sword struck the Curlesh’s carapace at the neck with a metallic clang and glanced off, sending up sparks. Ty’Lis reached for him with a huge hand. Oliver spun inside his reach and knocked the arm away with another blow from his sword.

“Kill him, Bascombe!” shouted a voice.

Oliver caught a single glimpse past Ty’Lis at the Sandman. As the creature struggled against those ribbons of darkness, its murderous features changed and Oliver saw the face of Ted Halliwell. Kitsune had told them the Sandman had survived, but now he knew it was far more than that. Somehow, Halliwell had survived as well, as a monster.

In that heartbeat of distraction, Ty’Lis struck him across the face, the hard shell of the Curlesh gashing his flesh. Oliver staggered back and fell. His fingers managed to hold onto the sword, but as he began to rise, several of those ribbons of darkness-stinking of ocean magic-darted toward him and trapped his arms to his sides even as they bound his legs.

The Sandman, Halliwell, whatever it was, rose up behind Ty’Lis, but the sorcerer’s putrid tentacles ripped him apart again.

“It ends now, Bascombe,” the sorcerer said, his voice low and distant, as though coming up from inside the cavernous chest of the Curlesh.

“What’re you, a complete idiot? You blind as well as stupid?” Oliver raged at him, struggling against the black ribbons. “There’s revolution in Yucatazca, and I only got a quick look at the battlefield, dumbass, but that was enough for me to figure out you’re losing this war!”

The face of the Curlesh had no expression, but its eyes twitched and the hinged mouth opened in what might have been a mocking smile. “It matters little. Every Door leading to the ordinary world is gone. I’ve had them sealed. Only a handful of Borderkind still live, and those will be eradicated. All that remains is for me to kill you and your sister, and the Two Kingdoms will be mine. Atlantis will rule. There are more soldiers to be had, other armies to manipulate. This battle will not decide the war.”

The confirmation that Collette was alive filled Oliver with strength.

He sneered. “I hate to break it to you, asshole, but Atlantis isn’t sending any more troops. All you’ve got left is whoever’s on the ships floating off the coast. Atlantis is gone.”

Those black ribbons continued to tear at the Sandman, off to the sorcerer’s left. But Oliver had his attention now.

“You lie.”

Oliver grinned.

Oily tentacles slammed him to the ground.

An icy breeze ruffled Oliver’s hair. Tiny bits of sleet stung his right cheek. He heard the voice of the winter man in his ear. “Tell him.”

At the very same moment, Oliver saw motion on the ridge behind Ty’Lis. Astonished, he watched Collette slip between two large trees and start swiftly, quietly, down the slope toward the monstrous sorcerer, carrying an enormous war-hammer in both hands.

“ Now, ” the winter man’s voice urged.

So many had died in Atlantis. Oliver felt sickened by what he had caused there. He could not have known the extent of destruction his touch would bring, but he would regret it for the rest of his life.

After today.

“No lie. I’m Legend-Born, remember?” Oliver said hurriedly, not daring another glance at Collette for fear of giving her away as she crept toward Ty’Lis. “You saw what I did to the side of the palace in Palenque. I unmade it. You thought we were only symbols, but the power inside of us is terrifying, even to me. You put your twisted magic inside that little boy, the prince, and left him as a trap for us. You left me no choice. I put all of my power down into the island, into Atlantis. I unmade it, you bastard. It’s gone. Swallowed by the ocean. Lost under the waves, just like the old stories.”

Ty’Lis shook. The Curlesh opened its mouth and bellowed. “You lie!”

But the sorcerer knew the truth. Oliver could see it in those horrid eyes as Ty’Lis spread the fingers of his right hand and began to speak the words of an incantation in the arcane tongue of ancient Atlantis. Streaks of mist swam like tiny eels around his fingers, a cloud of vague forms that began to lengthen as they slithered away from the sorcerer’s hand, moving toward Oliver.

The storm blew past Oliver.

Ice and snow churned around him, blotting out the sun for several seconds. He heard the bellow of the Curlesh again, furious at the winter man’s attack. The transformed sorcerer raised both hands as though to defend himself. Nearly all those oil-black ribbons of shadow struck out at Frost, but the winter man had no form. He was only storm, now, and far too swift for Ty’Lis.

The carapace of the Curlesh froze solid, rimed with ice. The tendrils of shadow faltered, some dissipating into black smoke. Even with his body frozen, fresh tentacles began to extrude from those same holes in the sorcerer’s hard shell.

But for the moment, Oliver was free.

He leaped to his feet and raced at Ty’Lis. He held the point of his sword straight in front of him, hoping to crack the carapace.

Ty’Lis began to move. The moisture on the black shell of the Curlesh had frozen, but now the ice showered down, cracking and shedding.

A tall figure sculpted itself out of sand just to the sorcerer’s left. Not the Sandman, however. Detective Ted Halliwell wore the high-collared greatcoat of the Dustman, but otherwise was himself. Then he exploded in a storm of sand, a scouring flurry of dirt and grit and dust. The sand blew around the ancient monster Ty’Lis had become and began plugging the holes that the jellyfish had left behind. The ground erupted around the legs of the Curlesh and hardened around them, trapping it in that position.

The ribbons of black smoke were cut off, the holes filled with sand.

Frost took form at last, just a few feet from where Julianna lay-too still, too damned still-beneath the twitching man, the jellyfish savaging him. The winter man froze the creatures with a flick of his wrists and a gust of wind that turned them to ice.

“Collette!” Oliver shouted. “Now!”

His sister had made it within a few feet of Ty’Lis. Had she not been slightly uphill, the pixyish Collette wouldn’t have had the height for it, but she swung the war-hammer with inhuman strength-legendary strength-and it struck the sorcerer in the side of the head. The carapace of the Curlesh cracked.

“Monsters! Destroyers!” Ty’Lis roared. “I’ll kill you all.”

Oliver might have laughed at the irony. Instead, he felt sick, and determined to finish the job.

“It’s not enough!” he called to his sister. “Use your hands!”

Collette didn’t have to ask what he meant. She dropped the war-hammer and grabbed hold of the Curlesh’s torso from behind. Ty’Lis tried to wrest himself free, but the ground held his legs tightly. Magic began to swirl around his hands again, the air shimmering like heat haze. Grotesque, guttural sounds came from his throat in a terrible incantation.

Sand blew down his throat, gagging him.

And Collette’s touch began to do its work. The black carapace of the Curlesh faded to a brittle gray.

Oliver drove the Sword of Hunyadi through the center of the sorcerer’s chest. The shell cracked easily, giving way, and the blade plunged through meat and bone and punched out through the Curlesh’s back.

Collette called out in protest. He’d nearly skewered her as well.

When he pulled the sword free, Ty’Lis fell to the grass, twitched once and then was still. A small dust storm blew up and then sifted itself into the body of Ted Halliwell, wearing that long coat with its high collar. Ted Halliwell, the new Dustman.

Collette picked up the war-hammer and brought it down on the skull of the Curlesh over and over, pounding the shell and bone and flesh of Ty’Lis’s head to pulp and powder.

Oliver spun and ran to where Frost stood over Julianna and the bald man whose flesh had been ravaged by the jellyfish. He knelt and pulled the man off of her. Frozen jellyfish shattered to shards of ice as he rolled the man over and felt for a pulse.

Whoever he’d been, he was dead.

Julianna’s eyelids fluttered, but did not open. Her breathing was labored and blood soaked through a bunch of ragged strips of her shirt that had been pressed over some kind of wound in her belly, but she was still alive.

A sound came from Oliver’s throat. Perhaps a prayer of thanks, perhaps a profession of love. He took her hand, letting his pulse and his breathing slow down.

“Ovid Tsing,” the winter man said.

“You knew him?”

“From Twillig’s Gorge. He was a good man.”

Oliver nodded. “He tried to protect her.”

Collette’s shadow fell over Julianna. Oliver looked up at his sister’s sorrowful eyes.

“He’s the one who stabbed her,” Collette said. “By accident. He wanted to kill Halliwell. Julianna got in the way.”

A sad smile touched Oliver’s lips.

The Dustman came to stand beside Frost. “Bascombe…Oliver…she’ll die without real medical attention. She needs a real surgeon. A hospital.”

Ted Halliwell had been a cop for decades. From what Julianna had said, he’d been in the military as well. He’d seen his share of wounds. He knew what he was talking about.

Oliver slid his arms under Julianna and lifted her off the ground, rising to his feet.

“Then I’ll take her there.”

Halliwell shook his head. The sun glinted off of bits of quartz mixed with the sand and dust that comprised his face. “She’s one of the Lost Ones. Julianna can’t go back.”

Oliver glanced at his sister. Collette nodded.

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “We’ll see about that.”

Collette stood next to him. Without exchanging a word, they reached out together, searching for the Veil. They were Legend-Born. They were made for this. Wayland Smith had introduced their parents just to bring about the birth of children who were half-human and half-Borderkind. What that truly meant, Oliver didn’t know, but it had to count for something. They had magic on their side. Power and prophecy.

“I..I can’t,” Collette said.

“This isn’t right.” Oliver could feel the Veil. He could sense its presence there, just beyond the reach of his mind and the power inside of him. He knew the Borderkind must find it that way, but they could open a passage, they could travel through.

“I felt it in Atlantis,” he said, turning to Frost, Julianna heavy in his arms. Her breathing seemed more ragged. “I helped you open it.”

The winter man nodded. “You helped widen it, but I opened the way.”

“Then open it now!” Collette said.

Frost hesitated. Oliver could see it in his eyes. He hated all that Ty’Lis had done, but he had stood against Atlantis at the beginning because they had sent the Myth Hunters out after the Borderkind. He had saved Oliver’s life not because he wished the prophecy of the Legend-Born to come true, but because it meant defying the Myth Hunters and their master.

The winter man feared the unknown. He was afraid of what would happen to his world if the prophecy came true. Oliver saw it all in his eyes, and he understood. But this was Julianna’s life.

“If we were ever friends…” he began, but could say no more.

Frost glanced from Halliwell to Collette and back to Oliver. In the end, he reached out a hand and touched Julianna’s hair, and he nodded.

With a gesture, the winter man opened a passage. The air trembled and a kind of archway appeared, mist swirling on the other side. Through the mist, Oliver could hear the honk of car horns and the roar of engines. Somewhere children laughed, and a mother shouted at her child to stop running.

Oliver glanced at Collette as his sister reached out. She grasped the edges of that passage, invisible to the eye, but he could feel her take hold and knew that he could do the same. Perhaps they could use their power to unmake the Veil, and perhaps not.

Now wasn’t the time to find out.

“See you soon,” Oliver said.

Collette nodded.

He hefted Julianna, bent to kiss her forehead, and then stepped forward. As he moved through that tear in the Veil, trying to cross the border between worlds, he felt resistance. Julianna was one of the Lost Ones. The Veil’s magic had been woven to keep her from traveling back to the land of the ordinary. But Oliver was not Borderkind. Nor was he merely ordinary. Nor was he a Walker Between Worlds. He’d been a lawyer and an actor, a son and a lover, a brother and a friend. Though they weren’t yet married, he understood that he’d become a husband, and nothing meant more to him than the woman who would be his wife.

He was both a legend and a man.

He stepped through the Veil, forcing aside whatever magic conspired to keep Julianna from coming home with him. Oliver Bascombe did the impossible. He tore the membrane of the Veil.

And the magic began to unravel.