Shadow's Curse (24 page)

“I’ll wait.” He spun on his heel, pushing his way through the crowd. His first thought was whisky. His second thought, hard on its heels, was Callista. His thirst died with a sick roll of his stomach.

For some reason, Nancy Oakham decided to follow. She kept pace, her condition in no way impairing her ground-eating stride. She eyed him like a disease with her too-shrewd gaze. “I don’t begin to understand who you are or why you’ve dragged Cally into your mess, but she deserves better. She deserves someone who’ll care for her. Who’ll protect her and be good to her.”

“Someone like your brother?”

“Why not? He’s not rich or elegant and he doesn’t act all high in the instep, but he’s got a good heart and he’d make Cally a good husband. If you cared at all for her, you’d see that.”

Was Nancy right? Marriage to Oakham would definitely thwart Hawthorne’s and Corey’s plans, and if anyone could defend his wife against all comers, the burly showman could. David had witnessed the man’s crack ability with knife and pistol during the few shows he’d performed on the road, and David knew the weight of his fists firsthand. Besides, if he left Callista behind, his odds on reaching Addershiels alive grew exponentially. She would be better off here, among people who cared about her. She would have a home. She wouldn’t be alone anymore.

“You and your brother love each other very much,” he said.

Nancy’s eyes widened, but she gave a jerk of a nod.
“Course we do. We’re family. Family take care of one another no matter what.”

He’d had a family once. And a clan. People who loved him. People who were there when he needed them.

He thought of Mac and his steadfast courage against the impossible. He thought of Gray and his hope when all seemed hopeless. And his heart squeezed uncomfortably in his chest when he remembered Adam, dead almost a year now, and the terrible words David had spoken that he’d never had a chance to take back.

The three of them had irritated David and angered him and driven him mad at times, but they had never once deserted him. Could he do any less now when they needed him?

“. . . and leave before things go any further.”

His hand dug into his pockets, coming up against the torn and crumpled notice.

“Before things go any further.”

Too late. They’d already moved far beyond Callista. It was personal now.

Someone wanted
him
.

Someone wanted the Imnada.

A scream threw his heart into his throat and sent his hand reaching for a nonexistent sword.

“That’s Cally.” Nancy took off at a half run, dodging some and thrusting others aside in her haste. David followed, fists clenched, nerves thrumming under his skin.

A pretty, blond woman stumbled out of the wagon, a handkerchief clutched to her mouth. A man followed, his gaze wildly scanning the crowd as if seeking assistance. He saw Nancy approaching with obvious relief. “Something’s wrong. I touched her and she was . . . she was stone cold. I think she’s dead . . .”

He babbled on, arms gesticulating, the woman by his side sobbing uncontrollably into her drippy handkerchief. David pushed past and into the wagon, leaving Nancy to handle her hysterical customers. Moving from bright light to darkness, he was blinded for a moment. He tripped and stumbled over an overturned chair, grabbing the table to steady himself. The candle flickered wildly while the bells set in a row before Callista clanked and rattled, one falling into her lap. She made no move to retrieve it. Instead she remained completely still, her lips tinged blue, her eyes a shimmering, iridescent gold, as if the heat of the sun boiled in her gaze.

“Callista?” He touched her hand where it rested on the handle of the largest bell. Not the cool moist give of death. Instead her flesh was as cold and white as marble, frost riming her hair and powdering her shoulders. He felt for a pulse, expelled a relieved breath to feel the flutter of her heart beneath his fingers.

“Callista, it’s time to come back.” He knelt beside her, cupping her face in his hands. “Look at me, Fey-blood. Hear me.”

Tears formed at the corners of her eyes, tracking slowly down her pale cheeks before freezing like diamonds at the corners of her mouth.

Frightened now, he shook her by the shoulders. “Damn it, Callista, wake up.”

Nothing.

Again. More roughly this time, his fingers growing numb where they touched her bare flesh, his stomach curdling into a tight ball. He’d never seen a necromancer at work, but surely this shouldn’t happen. This couldn’t be normal. What if she never woke? What if she was trapped in death forever?

The path wound. Turned and turned again. Right or left? She couldn’t remember. The thick trees obscured her view ahead and behind, and the landmarks she’d noted to guide her back had faded as if they’d never been.

The right path descended into a thick wood. The left rose to a high ridge before disappearing. Neither seemed familiar. She shouldn’t have come so far. The landscape was foreign, the twining paths looping and circling back. She had wanted to lead the Stockton child’s spirit deep into death, where it could not find its way back out. Now she was lost as well.

She chose the right-hand fork, hurrying down the slope and beneath the trees. Here within the deeper reaches, the paths were either strewn with rocks and exposed roots or sucking, quivering bogs one must traverse with care. The trees reached their black and skeletal branches to grab and harry, and there was always the threat of dangerous beings who would be drawn to her warmth and her light. She’d never encountered
one, but Mother had described them all in gory detail, making certain Callista understood the danger—shambling, mindless grel and rotting, worm-riddled dead-flesh, the ghostly, shrouded soul eaters with their reaching bony hands, and phantasms whose eerie wails sounded like the screams of a million condemned souls; the world’s nightmares made real.

The path narrowed, the footing treacherous. Beneath the trees, even the dim gray light faded to darkness. A prickle teased its cold way up her spine as if something watched from the undergrowth. She peered through the gloom, here and there catching a glimmer of light, a whisper in her ear. Spirits flickered like will-o’-the-wisps to lure her from the trail. Tempting her to new paths and untried roads as she struggled to find her way back to life.

She ignored the pull of their call, keeping to the rocky path, praying it led her somewhere recognizable before the cold or the creatures found her. Rounding a bend, she staggered to a halt, gazing out over a greasy gray bog, the water slick and still. Had she come this way? She couldn’t remember. But there was no turning around. The spirits closed in behind her and every now and then, she heard a fearsome growl or an inhuman shriek from the wood behind. Her presence had been discovered. The creatures of Annwn closed in.

She stepped carefully into the thick, oozing mud, sinking up to her ankles, her gown slapping against her legs as she moved slowly out toward the far shore where the trees gripped firmer earth. With the ash-handled Blade in her hand, she felt her way a step at a time despite the panic eating its way up through her gullet.

A ripple slid across the surface to her right; a shape rising and falling into the mud. She increased her pace as much as she dared, but the bog clung, sticky and cold; her stomach cramped against the icy pain, and there was no feeling in her calves.

Twenty paces away from the shoreline. Ten. The ripples moved toward her like an arrow loosed from a bow. She cried out, shoving herself onward through the glutinous sludge. Five paces. She was lurching for a scaly green branch to drag herself up and out, when the surface peeled away to reveal a long, eel-like creature. Its limbs were jointed at odd places—no normal creature had four elbows and three knees. But it was the face that was truly horrifying. A human skull, though the features seemed oddly askew and drooping, as if the flesh had melted. Its mouth was a wide gash showing rows of needle-sharp teeth; it had two vertical slits for a nose, and eyes round and white though clearly focused on her as it rose up out of the bog with a high-pitched, glass-shattering scream.

Her mother had called them grel—no earthly spirit to be frightened with a banishment spell traced in sound from Blade, the bell clutched in her fist. This was a creature of darkness and murder and disease and pain; a foul denizen of the deepest pits of Annwn that hungered for life and human flesh. Safe in her bed, Callista had shivered with delight upon hearing her mother’s tales of these creatures. Trapped within the tangled maze of Annwn’s realm, her shivers turned to racking, pulse-racing shudders.

She swung around, her lungs burning, her legs clumsy and slow as she fought to escape. Trees
scratched and clawed at her face, tugged at her gown. The grel lumbered behind her, its grasping arms reaching for her, claws long as scythes.

The path turned again. She knew this hedge. She’d passed that fallen log. The trees thinned, and she was back on familiar ground. The path broadened to a wide bricked track lined with stately limes. She was steps from the door that would take her back into the world of the living.

The grel broke from the woodland behind her, its bloody mouth drawn back from ear to ear as if someone had opened its skull with a sword, its screeching like claws down a slate, its breath an icy burn on her neck and arms.

It was joined by a second grel, and by one of the dead-flesh, shrouded in a black bloodstained cloak, a face half-pecked, an eye hanging loose from a socket, entrails spilling like greasy snakes from its belly. She stumbled and the closest grel stretched to lash her across the back with one of its long hooked claws, even as the dead-flesh reached with a hand, the skin sloughing away from the bone as it grabbed her around her wrist.

She sketched the signs that would call Key to her hand. Closed her fingers around the ebony handle and rang it once. Then twice more. The door opened. She slid through, slamming the passage closed behind her as agony ripped behind her eyes and wrenched a scream from her knotted throat.

*  *  *

“How do you feel?” David sat on a stool, knees drawn to his body, looking exceedingly uncomfortable. His
face was carved with tired lines, a grayish cast to his skin. But his eyes shone like pewter seas.

“Sore,” she replied.

The colorful, gauzy scarves festooning the caravan still drifted above her head, but the table had been shoved into a corner, cloth torn, candle wax smeared, and a long singeing burn near the hem. She lay on the bunk, a pillow beneath her head, the smell of unwashed sheets wrinkling her nose.

“No lasting damage? Broken bones? Internal bleeding?” he asked, his tone brisk and physician-like. She couldn’t decide whether she was annoyed, relieved, or still reeling from a bad knock to the head.

She inhaled slowly, feeling nothing worse than a tightness in her chest and an ache low across her back. Bracing a hand against the edge of the pallet, she eased herself over, teeth clamped. “I don’t think so.”

“Good. I’m glad one of us is feeling all right, because my damned heart stopped. What the hell happened?”

She gripped her head lest her brains ooze slowly out her ears. “Don’t yell at me.”

“I’m not yelling. I’m asking . . . loudly.”

“Sounds an awful lot like yelling to me,” she grumbled.

“Is this better?” he asked quietly through grinding teeth.

“Not much.”

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again with a questioning lift of his brows and a motion to continue.

“It needs work, but it’ll do,” she answered faintly.

“What happened, Callista?” he asked quietly, though no less intensely.

She rubbed her temples, trying to remember what she’d just as soon forget. “It was a stupid mistake. A beginner’s error. I should have known better, but Mrs. Stockton seemed so bereft. I kept thinking it would be all right. That I could find my way out.”

“What would be all right? Pretend I don’t know anything about necromancy or Fey-born magic and speak slowly and clearly.”

She started to sigh before catching it back, seeing the combined look of concern and concentration on his face. He wasn’t just furious—despite the bulging vein in his temple. He cared. A flutter of something besides fear bounced around her stomach. “Annwn is a tangle of paths, sort of like a funnel. The farther and deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes and the more difficult it is to retrace your steps. I went too far in and got lost.”

“Then what?” David looked as if he chewed nails, but at least his volume had receded to an acceptable level.

“There were creatures.” Even the memory was enough to send a freezing sweat between her shoulder blades. “I fled, but more caught my scent. I managed to open the door, but after that I don’t remember anything until I woke to you yelling at me.”

“And if I was? Damn it, I thought you were dead.”

A bleak smile touched her lips. “It’s nice having someone worried about me—noisy or otherwise.”

He didn’t return her smile. Instead he rose from his chair, arms folded across his chest, one hand on his chin as he pondered her words.