The Borderkind

CHAPTER 13

T he Vittora no longer spoke, not even nonsense words. Even the insinuating tone of its quotes from her favorite films had ceased. Collette sat propped against the grating sand wall of her strange cell, turned to one side, legs drawn up beneath her. She had made herself very small, there in that rounded prison. The moon and starlight that came through the high, arched windows provided no comfort. As though she lay in her bed at home and could burrow underneath the bedclothes for protection and privacy, she huddled there, lost in thought.

Her mind wandered, lulled and lured by the voice of the Vittora. It no longer spoke to her, but that did not mean it was silent. Rather, its voice had become a ceaseless song, a high, childlike, singsong melody that segued from “Over the Rainbow” to “As Time Goes By” to “In Your Eyes” and on through others before starting all over again. This perversion of the music from her favorite films had begun to tear down her passion for those cherished memories. The incessant humming was quickly becoming the soundtrack for her madness.

The Vittora, she’d been told, comprised all her hope. Its separation from her flesh was harbinger to her doom. Yet as she drew her limbs even more tightly to herself, it occurred to her that the Vittora might be the place she was storing the fear and hysteria that she ought to have been feeling.

In that moonlit pit, she sat in her filthy pajamas with sand in every conceivable crevice, the stale smell of her own body in her nose, and the stubble of her unshaven legs prickly under the cotton. The Vittora was a tiny sphere of light, no larger now than a baseball-a golden glow that flickered and swayed on the other side of the chamber as though taunting her.

But as much as she hated the thing and wanted to snuff it out completely, Collette felt certain that as long as the Vittora remained, she would not succumb entirely to terror. As long as the Vittora remained, she could think.

A vast abyss seemed to open up beneath her. Collette felt the pull of it, as though she teetered on the edge and would tumble into it any moment.

“Up,” she whispered.

With that single syllable, she placed one hand on the wall and practically leaped to her feet. The Vittora hummed the tune for the Lollipop Guild and Collette laughed under her breath. Images of the Munchkins of Oz blossomed in her mind but were quickly replaced by small children, mutilated by the Sandman.

“Fucker.” Her voice was a dry rasp. It seemed she had not had anything to eat or drink for a while, and presumed that her captor was punishing her for spying on him or trying to escape, or both.

The question is how, she thought. How the hell did you do that?

The Vittora sang softly, as though to itself. Collette turned her back on it, half wishing the thing would simply disappear despite what that might mean. She stared at the gently curved wall, at the glitter of small bits of quartz or other reflective mineral in the sand.

Brow furrowed, she reached out and pressed the tips of her fingers against the wall. Nothing. It was entirely unyielding. Adding pressure, she tried to dig her fingers in, staring at the sand, at her ragged fingernails. Gritting her teeth, she put her weight into it, trying to drive her nails in. A little dart of pain shot up her ring finger and she hissed and pulled away, sucking on that finger, wondering if she had torn the nail.

Where was the door?

With only her palm, she brushed against the hard, abrasive surface of the sand wall, but it was truly like cement. She had been around and around her cell, probing for another soft place like the one she had discovered before, and found nothing.

Home. Collette had felt it, sensed it, tasted and smelled it. That bedroom, where the child had been horribly murdered, existed back in her own world. The place she was supposed to be. The Sandman could pass back and forth between the two worlds.

“So did he let me through, or did I dig my own way?” she whispered to the wall, to the night.

The Vittora paused and for a moment she thought it would give one of its nonsense replies, but then it began humming again, a shrill melody that she recognized from childhood, from some Disney film or other, though she could not place it precisely.

She ignored it.

Focused on the wall, she tried again to press her fingers into the sand, working the tips against the wall. Grimly determined, she slid her fingers across the hard surface, testing again and again. Useless. The wall was only a wall and her fingers could not penetrate.

It had to have been the Sandman, making the sand malleable, giving her the chance to follow. The creature had allowed her to dig away at soft sand and find that door and see what she had seen.

But then, why was he so furious?

The question lingered. She remembered quite well the way it felt to plunge her fingers into the yielding sand and to excavate that door that led out of her prison. It had certainly felt as though she was doing it herself.

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?”

Julianna took a small step forward, drawing the guards’ attention. “His name is Oliver Bascombe. I’m going to guess it sounds familiar to you, since the king’s put a price on his head. But if we’re right, he came here today looking for some mercy. All we want to know is if he found any, and if he’s still here.”

From the guards’ reaction, it was obvious they knew precisely what she was talking about. Julianna allowed herself a tiny bit of hope, but the guards were clearly troubled by her words, and so that tiny bit was all she could muster.

But Kara glanced back at her and smiled, and that comforted her.

The Viking studied the trio at the castle gates and then glanced up to the archers above them on the wall. “Tage, go and get Captain Beck and return immediately.”

The nearest of the archers-apparently this Tage-lowered his bow and nodded, disappearing below the battlements. Kara raised her hands.

“Gentlemen, what is the trouble? Our request has been put forth as politely as possible. As subjects of His Highness, we desire some response.”

The handsome guard narrowed his eyes. “Oh, you’ll have it.” Then he drew his sword.

Halliwell went for his gun, eyes flashing with violence, as though he had been waiting for just such a moment.

“No!” Julianna snapped, grabbing his hand, preventing him from drawing the weapon.

Both guards drew their blades with a chime of metal. Kara froze, hands still in the air. She lowered them slowly, palms forward.

“Calm down, my friends. There is no need for drama.”

Julianna held on to Halliwell’s wrist. His chest rose and fell and he glared at her. His jaw clenched and unclenched, and she could see that he did not want the moment to pass. He invited conflict, bloodshed-even death-as just another distraction, and a way to vent the despair and fury that was eating him up inside.

“Ted-” she began, warily.

“This was not the world’s most cunning plan,” he rasped. “Just walking up and telling them what we want, knowing how much trouble your fiance is in…”

“We don’t have time for secrets, Ted. We’re not spies. I’d rather die for the truth than a lie.”

Halliwell relaxed his hands, let them fall to his sides, and Julianna released his wrist. Together they turned to watch the two guards who stood with their swords drawn. The tableau of these hulking men with their blades gleaming in the moonlight, standing there in the dark as though defending themselves from a pretty little girl, was unsettling as hell. The line of archers on the wall, ready to pin them all to the ground, only made it that much worse.

“If it’s all the same to you,” Halliwell muttered, “I’d rather not die at all.”

Julianna nodded. “Yeah. Well, at the end of your days, when the Reaper comes to collect, that’s what you should tell him. Let me know how that goes, will you?”

With a groaning creak of hinges, the gates of the castle’s outer wall swung inward. Chains rattled, and they watched the portcullis grate rise upward. A small cadre of leather-armored soldiers of varying race and gender-Julianna counted nine-emerged along with a tall, formidable woman whose ebony skin was the deepest black Julianna had ever seen. Her cloak, tunic, and heavy trousers were all black as well, which only served to make her skin seem all the darker. She carried herself with the grace and dignity of a goddess, and with such power that the sword that hung at her side seemed an afterthought.

Kara went down on one knee before her.

Julianna and Halliwell glanced at one another, wondering if they ought to do the same.

“I am Captain Damia Beck,” she declared. “Primary advisor to His Highness, John Hunyadi. I’d have your names, travelers.”

“I am Ngworekara,” Kara began.

Captain Beck arched an eyebrow and gazed down at her. “So I’m told. Curious and a bit troublesome, that is. How many parents would give their child such a mischievous name?”

Julianna frowned. What was the woman talking about? She might have asked, but then Captain Beck turned her formidable gaze upon her.

“And you?”

“Julianna Whitney.”

Halliwell crossed his arms. “Detective Theodore Halliwell.”

Beck’s placid features rippled with curiosity. “Detective? Interesting. Yes, we get one of you from time to time. Always looking in the places no one else bothers to see, so they stumble through. But you’re not a detective here, you do know that, Mister Halliwell? You’re in the Kingdom of Euphrasia now, the realm of Hunyadi.”

“So I’m told,” Halliwell replied.

Captain Beck smiled. “Excellent. Then you won’t mind handing over your gun.”

Halliwell flinched. He looked at her more closely. “I’d rather hang on to it, if it’s all the same to you.”

One of the archers above barked an order and they all leaned over the wall, bowstrings humming as they were drawn taut. Julianna held her breath.

But Beck waved a hand and they all relaxed. Her face lit up with a knowing smile. Her hands disappeared inside her robe in the single blink of an eye and she produced a pair of gleaming silver revolvers. They glittered in the moonlight.

“Guns are crude,” Captain Beck said. “We do not like them here. In fact, very few are allowed to carry them. They’re a product of the human world and never manufactured here.”

She gestured with one of her pistols. “Well, almost never. Now, please, let’s not make any trouble. You want to speak with the king about Oliver Bascombe. I may be able to arrange that. But not while you have a gun. I’m sure you understand.”

Halliwell glared at her. Julianna could see the doubt in his eyes, see him weighing the odds of them getting out alive if he refused. Pure stubbornness. The odds were a billion to one and it shouldn’t have taken a millisecond to consider them.

“I suspect Miss Whitney and your guide could meet the king without you, Detective,” Captain Beck added, cocking both pistols and aiming them at Halliwell’s head.

A humorless smile touched his lips. Halliwell pulled his gun slowly and held it out, butt first. Captain Beck nodded, and the guard who looked like a Viking came over and took it from him. He handled the thing as though it were a dead rat he’d just found in his basement.

“This way, please,” Damia Beck said.

She holstered her pistols in the darkness within her cloak and turned on her heel, striding through the gates. Julianna blinked, surprised it could be so simple. But the soldiers split into two groups, making room to let them pass. The archers withdrew from the walls above.

The Viking tossed Halliwell’s gun to the ground just beside the gate. “It’ll be here when you come out. If you come out.”

Halliwell ignored him and started after Captain Beck. Kara and Julianna followed as well. With no other escort-as though they represented no threat at all-they were allowed to pass through the gates and across the courtyard to the castle itself.

Inside the stone corridors, lit by torches and lamps, Damia Beck looked both more beautiful and more formidable. Her cloak swirled around her as she walked.

“Excuse me, Captain,” Kara ventured.

Beck glanced back at her. “Yes?”

“It’s just…I’d heard that the monarchs of the Two Kingdoms always had Atlantean advisors. You hardly look Atlantean.”

Captain Beck sniffed dryly. “People are often not what they seem. But you’re correct that I am not Atlantean. That…policy…is currently being reconsidered. My elevation to primary advisor is fairly recent. It has been a difficult day, here at Otranto. Your arrival is ill-timed. But we shall see what His Highness wishes. What the future will hold, no one may know.”

Julianna trudged along behind Kara and the captain. She glanced back several times at Halliwell. His gaze had turned cold again, and his expression was grim. He moved as though they walked to the gallows, the spark of hope gone. She wanted to tell him not to lose faith, that he would see his daughter again. But Julianna knew how hollow that would sound.

Captain Beck was right. No one could know the future. And, at the moment, theirs was very much in doubt.

Oliver Bascombe had done many foolish things in his life, but he did not consider himself a fool. Others might, perhaps, but even those who would happily recall his least admirable moments would never have called him stupid.

He had driven the stolen rental car-though since he had given the clerk his credit card number, he didn’t think it could technically be considered stolen-through the winding streets of Vienna until he had found a bank with an ATM machine. With his card, he withdrew the daily limit on his account, and then took a cash advance on his credit card as well. If someone had flagged his card and the police were looking for him, they might well trace him to Vienna and even to this bank, but that was as far as they would get.

Kitsune had stayed in the rental car until he signaled her, and then she had abandoned it on the curb and joined him on the sidewalk. They had walked a dozen blocks or so. The night was astonishingly beautiful. A light snow fell, bringing with it a kind of winter hush that muffled the sounds of the cars and the grind of the city. Somewhere a chorus was singing Christmas songs. A rainbow of lights gleamed all through the streets from decorations on buildings and in shop windows and strung from lampposts. People laughed together and couples held hands as they passed. In the cobblestoned square in front of a great cathedral, a solitary couple waltzed alone.

How Oliver had envied them.

They had walked a distance from the abandoned rental car before hailing a cab, wanting to make it as difficult as possible for anyone who might track them-no matter what side of the Veil their pursuers might come from.

Now Oliver sat in an uncomfortable chair in a hotel room in a neighborhood that did not have any gleaming Christmas decorations, a place where no voices were raised in song. In college he had backpacked with Bob Dorsey from Amsterdam to Prague, traveling by train and staying in grimy youth hostels filled with cockroaches. It had been his own money-cash Oliver had earned tutoring-and it felt good to do something that wasn’t reliant on his father’s money. The filth had been amusing to him back then.

Now it was just filth.

This place was not nearly as bad as the worst of those hostels, but it was decidedly unpleasant. The stuffing in the chair had worn thin, the fabric faded and ragged. The carpet was no better, neither the curtains. But here, at least, no one tried to arrest him or have him killed. For the moment, he could not ask for more. A rest and a shower, that would do.

Until the hour arrived to put Kitsune’s plan into action. At that point, it would begin all over again. Yet there was no other way. Or, at least, no way that would not have taken days longer. It was hard to stomach even this short delay, knowing that Collette lingered in the custody of the monster who’d murdered their father and torn out his eyes.

The drive into Vienna had given him time to plan: find the ATM, get some distance from the abandoned car, take a cab, locate a hotel shitty enough to have a room they could use on Christmas Eve and for which they could pay cash. That explained all of the hookers going in and out of the lobby.

If the police were searching for him, there were only two possibilities he could think of. Either they wanted him in connection with the events on Canna Island-the murder of Professor Koenig and the fire that burned his home-or Oliver was a suspect in his father’s murder.

It never occurred to him that they might want to question him on both matters, and that there might be more-that there might be worse. In fact, it never occurred to him that there could be anything worse than being a suspect in the murder of your own father and the disappearance of your sister.

So they had checked into the hotel and taken turns showering, and now Kitsune lay on the bed, curled up beneath the comforter, having left plenty of room for Oliver. But he forced himself to stay in that uncomfortable, worn and faded chair and watched CNN, trying to avoid the bright jade eyes that would drift from the television screen every so often to cast him a glance full of equal parts curiosity, desire, and disappointment. He did his best to focus on the telling nature of CNN’s international newscast, which truly did provide news from around the world; at home, the news was weighted a hundred to one in favor of American coverage.

When the story began, he did not realize it was what he had been waiting for, and yet he was riveted with horror by the story of the murder of twenty-seven children at a German orphanage. Even the word “mutilated” did not register except to make him shudder with revulsion and wonder what sort of monster would do such a thing.

Then the report began to link other cases to that German atrocity. Prague. Toronto. Paris. New Orleans. San Francisco. In those cases, only one or two children had been killed, but all of the murders had been in the last few weeks, and according to local authorities as well as U.S. and European officials, the mutilations in each case were similar enough to make them believe some kind of cult was involved.

There did also seem to be a connection to another series of murders and mysterious disappearances, however.

Oliver’s mouth opened slowly, his eyes widening. His father’s face appeared on the screen. The murder of Maximilian Bascombe shared disturbing similarities to those of the dead children, as did that of Alice St. John, a little girl from Cottingsley, Maine. Both of Bascombe’s children had vanished…

“But authorities on two continents are searching for this man, Oliver Bascombe, son of the late Maximilian Bascombe, for questioning in regard to this international string of heinous crimes and also concerning the murder of a retired college professor, David Koenig, in Scotland. Yet the mystery only deepens. Confirmed sightings of Oliver Bascombe in London and Scotland prompted independent investigators Ted Halliwell and Julianna Whitney to travel from Maine to the United Kingdom to seek him out, only to vanish themselves on the night of David Koenig’s murder. If you have seen this man-”

The words continued but he could not hear anymore. It was as though he had gone deaf.

Oliver brought both hands to his forehead. His mouth hung open and his body shook as he drew in tiny gasps of air. Slowly he slid from the chair and his legs folded beneath him. He contracted in upon himself, leaning against the wall, trembling with denial and hopelessness.

It was her scent that made him aware of Kitsune’s presence beside him. She had curled up on the threadbare carpet and tried now to comfort him, but when she touched him he flinched and contracted further, trying to burrow deeper within himself, perhaps hoping in some way that he might disappear completely.

If she spoke to him, he did not hear. Though she did not try to touch him again, she remained there, curled on the floor nearby as though she could absorb some of the pain from him.

A vast gulf had opened within Oliver. Hollow, he huddled there and waited for the emptiness inside to fill again, at least enough so that he could stop shaking; so that he could get up and get on with what had to be done.

He feared that it never would.