The Borderkind (9 page)

A small smile touched his lips as his mind flooded with memories and images of Julianna: the music of her laughter; the knowing, indulgent look in her eyes; the way her fingers slid into his on sheer instinct; and how perfectly their bodies molded together as they curled together, whether on the sofa to watch a movie or in bed after making love.

Simple magic.

They both loved the ocean best in winter, and at night. They shared a hatred of bars and a passion for bad Chinese food, and they were endlessly amused by each other’s taste in music. One of the few times they had found themselves in musical agreement was a Saturday afternoon in September, their senior year in high school, when they’d driven down to Portland to see James Taylor at an outdoor music festival. Julianna rarely enjoyed older music, but had fallen under the sway of Taylor’s sweet voice and acoustic guitar.

Sitting on a blanket on the grass, she had leaned in close to him, Oliver’s arm around her, and they had just soaked it all in—four generations sprawled around the park with their picnic baskets and beach chairs, the beer and wine flowing, dancing and singing along.

Oliver had kissed her head, breathing in the scent of her.

“They’re all about you, Jules.”

She had looked up at him, confused. “What?”

“The songs. They’re all about you.”

James Taylor had launched into “Something in the Way She Moves” right then, and Julianna—eyes wide open, shivering just a little—had kissed him like he had never been kissed before.

That
was magic.

Kitsune stirred something primal in Oliver; he could not deny that. But he could never have the intimacy with her that he shared with Julianna, and he would never sacrifice that simple magic.

Jules,
he thought.
You’d hardly recognize me now.

The night was long for Kitsune. The legend of Twillig’s Gorge established it as a safe haven, a sanctuary for anyone who wished to escape the rest of the world and live peacefully. Yet there were enemies here. Worse, though there might well be spies amongst the Lost Ones and the legendary, they had found treachery amongst the Borderkind. It was appalling enough that some, like Coyote, were too frightened and selfish to stand with their kin and fight, but the idea that there were turncoats among the Borderkind was especially difficult to bear.

Jenny Greenteeth had been her friend. But now it had become distinctly clear that Kitsune could trust only herself, Oliver, Blue Jay, and Frost. They had fought side by side and would have given their lives for one another.

How much simpler it would have been never to have left the Oldwood, to have just waited for the Hunters to come after her. Yet she pushed such thoughts away. This conspiracy against the Borderkind could not be allowed to go without reprisal.

Until then, however…she would take care, and watch her back.

That night, she slept as a fox, curled up beneath the bed in her room at the inn. Anyone who entered thinking to do her harm would find rumpled blankets but no one in bed. Yet though Kitsune had slept through storms and blizzards, in bramble patches and underground dens, and despite her exhaustion, she did not sleep well.

At night, the inn was cold, and she wound more tightly in upon herself. Voices in the corridor or from out the window, down in the gorge below, carried to her and her ears pricked. Kitsune knew she had made the right choice, going with Oliver. Frost had promised only to see him safely to Professor Koenig, but to let him go off on his own now…Well, they might as well kill him themselves. He’d proven surprisingly courageous and resilient for an ordinary man, but he was still just human. Not that she blamed Frost. The threat to the Borderkind far outweighed the potential loss of one human life.

But she had spoken truly. She did not want Oliver to die. Her pulse raced at the nearness of him. The fox in her
desired
him. It confused Kitsune horribly. How could she have such yearning for a fragile, mundane man?

Yet there was no denying it.

He was promised to another, and loved her. But Kitsune hungered for him, and she would see him safely on his journey or die herself.

All through the night she drifted in and out of sleep. It lasted an eternity, and each time she peeked out from beneath the bed to see that the sky beyond her window was still the rich black velvet of night, she was newly astonished. It seemed morning would never come.

When, at last, she opened her eyes to see that the darkness had taken on a golden glow, the first hint of impending sunrise, she was still exhausted, but she could not close her eyes again. Dawn approached, and they were to leave.

She stretched, tail twitching behind her. The floor was dusty and her eyes began to water. The fox sneezed, then shook her whole body before slipping out from beneath the bed. Kitsune glanced around the room, still anxious, and at last she began to stretch again. This time the motion did not stop, and her muscles lengthened, smooth as liquid, bones shifting.

In the midst of her room, she reached up and pulled back her hood. She had bathed before retiring the night before. Now she went into the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and ran her fingers through her long hair to straighten it.

Kitsune yawned and met the gaze of her reflection. She ought to go and wake Oliver, but somewhere in the inn, there was breakfast cooking. Her stomach grumbled. Greasy bacon would be wonderful. Eggs as well. Raw if she could find them. She wondered if there would be coffee. If she hurried, she could bring breakfast up to Oliver and they could be gone within an hour after sunup. That ought to be near enough to dawn to satisfy the sentries.

She left the room, locking the door behind her. Her tread silent upon the stairs, she descended to the first floor. In the foyer, the smell of breakfast cooking was powerful and merely inhaling it filled her with renewed vigor.

But there was another scent there, one that she recognized.

Wayland Smith had said he would be there to see them off at dawn, but his scent lingered. He had already arrived. Kitsune sniffed again, nostrils flaring, to be certain she was not mistaken. No, he was here. Had passed by only moments before.

Breakfast was served in a small room at the front of the inn, almost diagonally opposite the tavern where they had met the previous evening. The tavern would be closed now, the stink of stale ale remaining no matter how many times the tables had been scrubbed. It would be dark, and empty.

Or it ought to have been. But this morning, the tavern was not entirely unoccupied.

This early in the morning, she saw only the innkeeper as she walked noiselessly toward the tavern. Soon the few other guests at the inn would begin to rise to make their way down for breakfast, at least if the aroma of food was any indication. It occurred to her that the innkeeper and his wife might be feeding themselves now so that they could attend to their handful of guests when they rose. That was sensible.

But even as such thoughts crossed her mind, she was following Wayland Smith’s scent and listening to the low drone of voices coming from the tavern. Kitsune narrowed her eyes and raised her hood, resisting the urge to transform. She did not need to be in the form of a fox to have a fox’s hearing. Even before she reached the open arched entrance to the tavern, she could make out the voices well enough, and knew to whom they belonged.

Wayland Smith and Frost.

At first this set her at ease. She had been growing more and more distrustful, and was suspicious of Smith to begin with. He had been there at Amelia’s the night they were betrayed, after all. But if he was with Frost, that was to be expected. They would be discussing the Borderkind, what message Smith ought to be conveying, and which of their kin Frost and his coterie might be likely to encounter on their way to Yucatazca.

But that was not the subject of their conversation.

“You’re taking a great risk with the Bascombes,” Smith said.

Kitsune froze, then slipped into the shadows just outside the entrance to the room. Frost and Smith both had keen senses, but nothing like a fox. They would not notice her as long as she did nothing foolish.

“It cannot be helped,” Frost replied. “Whoever is behind the Hunters—whether it be Ty’Lis or some unknown enemy—they must be destroyed. I do not wish Oliver and his sister ill, but the needs of the Borderkind take precedence.”

Wayland Smith laughed softly, bitterly. “When it comes to the Bascombes, how can you know what the Borderkind need?”

“I do not claim to. I only know that attacking our enemies directly will at least mean the deadliest creatures in the Two Kingdoms are too busy to chase them.”

Kitsune frowned. All of this was gibberish to her. It did not seem that they meant Oliver harm, but there were secrets here, most certainly.

“You hope,” Smith replied. “Why not just trumpet his presence, then? The Lost Ones would rush to his aid if they understood who he was. He and his sister.”

“Oh, yes, excellent plan,” Frost said. “At the moment, only a very few know who the Bascombes are, and what their presence could mean. If everyone knew, there would be far more who would try to kill them than protect them. Oliver is in enough danger as an Intruder, but he has a small chance of gaining a reprieve if he is clever. Why have every legend in the Two Kingdoms after his blood?

“No, there’s nothing more that can be done. I must see to my kin first. His fate is in his own hands. And Kitsune’s. Much as we could use her, I’m glad she is going with him. He stands a chance, with her.”

From within the tavern came the sound of a match being lit, and then the smell of Smith’s pipe, the tobacco rich and earthy. He spoke between puffs.

“You’ve really made a mess of this, haven’t you, Frost?” he said grimly.

There was a moment of pause. From within the tavern came the tinkling sound of ice crystals as Frost moved.

“You’d do well to watch your tone with me, sir.”

“Of course,” Wayland Smith replied.

The fear in his voice made Kitsune shiver.

“It was bad enough when I began to hear of Hunters preying upon Borderkind, murdering our cousins. I knew right away something had to be done, that some dark power saw us as a threat and wanted to eradicate us. But when I heard whispers that they had been sent after the Bascombes, I knew I had to protect them. Had I time, I would have brought others. It would have been so much simpler. But the Falconer surprised me. He was faster than I expected. I was wounded.”

Smith puffed on his pipe, and when he spoke again, his voice was rough from smoke. “You had no choice.”

“None. I was too weak to spirit them away. Oliver helped me get to a place where I could cross through the Veil. The only way to save him was to take him through with me.”

“Putting a death warrant on his head for trespassing?”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Frost said, his tone as crisp and cold as his skin. “Just as I had no choice but to leave Collette behind. I couldn’t take them both—”

“But you only needed one to survive. So you sacrificed the sister.”

“No,” Frost snapped. “I was…fairly sure that the Falconer would pursue us. He could have found the sister at any time in the mundane world. But with Oliver in our world, that was trickier. It was a risk, I admit. But even now, they haven’t killed Collette.”

“They’re keeping her as bait,” Smith said darkly.

“But she’s alive.”

Kitsune shuddered. Once again she had misjudged who she could and could not trust. How many secrets was Frost keeping from her? From Oliver? There was more to this, and she would have answers, but this concerned Oliver more than it did her and he ought to be with her when she confronted Frost.

In swift silence she raced into the foyer. As she went up the stairs she caught new scents. Chorti and Cheval Bayard were about to arrive, ready to ally themselves with Frost. That was fine with Kitsune. It was time that secrets were exposed and true loyalties revealed.

No matter the consequences.

CHAPTER
5

W
ith the dawn light peering over the upper ridge of the plateau where they had camped the night before, Julianna sat with her legs pulled up beneath her and stared at the breathtaking beauty of sunrise. Halliwell lay on the ground fifteen feet away, arms akimbo, snoring lightly. From the ache in her own bones, she knew that he would be a wreck when he woke. Every hour of sleep he had managed to steal on the hard-packed earth of the plateau would be another knotted muscle, but she could not bring herself to wake him.

She was not sure what to make of Halliwell now.

When he had first been saddled with bringing her along in pursuit of Oliver, the man had been distant and arrogant. No more so than many men she had known, of course, but it had been tiresome. As they had traveled from the States to the U.K., things had warmed between them. Julianna had decided that she liked him. Curmudgeon that he was, Halliwell was an intelligent man and good at his job. She had also begun to believe that her newfound respect for him was reciprocated. And perhaps it had been.

But here, the rules had changed.

Halliwell wanted answers to the mysteries that his investigation had presented, but they needed to find Oliver for a different reason entirely now. If they had any hope of getting out of here, of waking from the nightmare of this impossible place, it lay in Oliver’s hands.

Whatever had happened to Oliver—and the surreality of their surroundings made it appear that there was no simple explanation for that—it was clear now to Julianna than he probably had not abandoned her without reason. If he had an explanation, she wanted to hear it.

She had loved him for so long that he was a part of her, under her skin and in her every breath. When she had thought that he had abandoned her at the altar, she had been crushed. But what she could never have explained to anyone was that what had shattered her heart was not the idea that he had decided not to marry her; it had been the thought that he did not trust her love for him enough to come and talk to her about it.

As horrifying as Max Bascombe’s murder—and Collette’s disappearance—had been, they had made her doubt the version of events that everyone she knew had been so quick to embrace; that Oliver had simply gotten cold feet and vanished. Julianna hated the fact that she had initially embraced this as truth.

She ought to have known better. Julianna was not a fool; she had sensed his hesitation, and she understood it. How could she not? No one in the world knew him the way she did. But if Oliver had changed his mind about getting married, he would never have let her find out at the altar.

They’d known each other most of their lives, but had only become friends during freshman year of high school, when they’d been partnered up in biology lab. Julianna had always thought Oliver was cute, but he was such a boy, and she didn’t have time for the foolishness of boys when she was younger. Older guys intrigued her then, because she had been such a serious girl, a brooding poetess, scribbling her heart’s every yearning and ache by candlelight in her bedroom. She had always been close to her father and their conversations around the dinner table had made her a thoughtful, opinionated child with a deep appreciation for a good debate.

Her poetry was private and full of all of the parts of her that her father would not have understood, never having been an adolescent girl. Her mother had tried to nurture her relationship with her daughter through “girls only” shopping trips and special dinners for just the two of them when Julianna’s father was out of town, but the bond between father and daughter had been different. They’d always been at ease in one another’s company.

When she and Oliver had become friends, that first year of high school, Julianna knew she had found the only other person in the world she had ever felt that way around. He understood how private her poetry was and never pressed her to read it, but whenever she allowed him to, he would look at her as though she’d given him some kind of gift. She had admired his closeness with his sister, who was off at college but came home to visit frequently.

Oliver had been one of the cutest boys in their class and friendly to everyone, but he and Julianna had become a clique all their own. But their friendship had not grown into anything more, which astonished everyone they knew. Instead, they advised each other on every crush and flirtation through the first two years of high school. She liked that Oliver never seemed to want the girls who wanted him. He preferred interesting to pretty, and focused on juniors and seniors, the same way Julianna herself did with the boys.

It was only much later that she came to wonder if they had both been concentrating on people who were beyond their reach in order to avoid falling in love with anyone else.

At the end of sophomore year, Oliver had appeared in his first play. He had always loved drama and music and Julianna had encouraged him to audition. His father had dismissed his interest in theater as an unnecessary distraction. Football would have been fine, but theater, somehow, did not fit Max Bascombe’s image of the young man he wanted his son to become.

Oliver might have auditioned to spite him, or because Julianna would not leave him alone about it, but once he was cast in the play—a production of
42nd Street
—his motives became pure. He had simply loved the magic of the stage, the freedom of transforming into someone else.

Julianna understood. Her poetry provided her a similar freedom.

The show was performed half a dozen times. Collette came all the way home from Boston College to see her little brother on stage, but Oliver’s father never managed to attend.

After the last performance, Julianna had gone backstage and found Oliver standing in the wings by himself. He did not mention his father’s absence, but she saw the hurt in his eyes.

She’d held him then.

Nothing was the same after that night.

They spent their junior and senior years lost in each other, physically and emotionally, happy to make their classmates’ predictions come true. Somehow, rather than suffering from the intensity of their relationship, their grades actually improved. The future was important to both of them.

And it had almost ruined them.

The summer after their graduation from high school had been the saddest time of Julianna’s life. She and Oliver had stayed together, but their every kiss and touch had been bittersweet. They had agreed that they had to pursue their own paths, that they would be doing a disservice to themselves and each other if they did not reach for their dreams.

Oliver had gone to Yale, in Connecticut. Julianna had attended Stanford, all the way across the country, in California. Surrendering to logic, they had promised one another that if, when college was through, they were both single, they would be together again, but that there would be no promises in the meanwhile. It was only practical.

At Yale, Oliver had followed the pre-law curriculum and spent all four years in the Drama Club, fulfilling his father’s plan for him while still following his own heart. At Stanford, Julianna had fallen for a California guy two years older than she was. All of the anguish and drama of her poetry came alive in that relationship. He turned out to be shallow and callous, and forced her to wonder how she could be so wrong about someone.

The asshole went to Stanford Law. Julianna refused to follow him there. When she learned Oliver would be attending Yale Law School, she knew that she had to go as well. Older and wiser, she knew that the intimacy she’d shared with Oliver was a rare thing. To have such passion with someone, combined with an abiding trust, was so precious that only a fool would surrender it willingly.

They had a chance to make up for a terrible mistake they had made four years earlier. Julianna had never been much of a believer in destiny, but could not deny that it felt as though they had always been meant to be together.

She still felt that way.

Ted Halliwell needed to find Oliver because he wanted answers, and he wanted to go home. Julianna wanted those things as well, but what Halliwell did not understand was that, to her, finding Oliver
was
going home. The lunacy and horror that had intruded upon their lives had made her question her faith in Oliver, but she was beyond that now. She still had questions, but no longer had doubts.

All she really wanted was to be reunited with him. Everything else was secondary.

Halliwell had different priorities.

But to find Oliver, to survive in this place, she and the detective were going to have to work together. At first that had seemed obvious and natural, but now she had begun to grow concerned. Halliwell had cooled to her. She felt it. The truth was, they had been fellow travelers before, working together. Not friends. And Julianna was no fool. Halliwell knew where her loyalties were, and whose side she would be on if he had any conflict with Oliver when they caught up to him.

Yet they
had
to travel together. They had only each other to rely on.

Julianna shuddered and hugged herself tightly. The night had grown cold with the wind whipping across the top of the plateau, but there had been nothing they could do about it. She wished she had not left her jacket behind. That had been foolish.

She watched the golden light of the sun spread across the sky. Soon it would reach her, warm her, and the air would begin to heat up. Halliwell would stir.

During the night, she had woken several times and felt a rising spark of hope that she would find herself back in her world, in a place that made sense and followed the rules that she understood.

Now, with the sunrise, she realized that it had been a dangerous moment. She might have gone mad, fighting the need to accept the reality of the world around her. To accept magic and giants and rivers that spoke with human voices, and the dead things they had seen back in the real world on Canna Island.

“Real world,” she whispered. “Can’t think like that.”

This place, this world,
was
real. Accepting that was the only way to survive. Yet from the look in Halliwell’s eyes last night, she was not sure if he had quite accepted it. The detective was numb, moving from one place to another with the single-minded determination of an angry drunk.

Maybe he has to be that way. Maybe that’s how he needs to survive,
she thought. That made sense to her. Finding Oliver was all that mattered to Halliwell. Slowing down for a moment to look too closely at the world they were traveling through would only confuse and distract him.

The more she thought about it, the more Julianna thought that was a good strategy. Full speed ahead. Don’t look too closely. And whatever you do, don’t stop to smell the roses. No telling what they might really be.

They had spent all the long afternoon of the previous day making their way up the ridgeline to the top of the cliff, following a switch-back for a while and then a steep hill. In the end, they had found themselves miles from where they had begun, but on top of the plateau, looking down into the valley as night fell.

This morning, they would strike back toward the spot where the river went into the cliff face, then follow what they hoped was the path of the river until they reached the other side of the mountain, the far end of the plateau, and then descend to the valley or basin or whatever they found there, and follow the water again.

If the river did not disappear underground forever.

In that case, they would not have a clue where to begin.

Julianna ran her fingers through her hair. Her bladder felt full and she got up, muscles popping in protest, her whole body aching, and stumbled off behind a stand of shrubbery to pee.

When she came back, the sun had just touched the edge of the plateau, nowhere near Halliwell, but the lightening of the sky must have been enough to rouse him, for he was stirring. Julianna had never asked Halliwell his age, but pegged it at early fifties. Not old, but a long way down the road from young. He was at least her father’s age, but there was something she found attractive about the detective with his gruff features and piercing blue eyes, his somber expression and more-salt-than-pepper hair in need of a cut. Halliwell could have been an actor. Not a star, perhaps, but one of those character players that people recognized right off but whose names they could never remember.

She slipped her hands into her pockets and stood a few feet away as he slowly woke. A groan escaped his lips and he opened his eyes, reaching up to scrape the remnants of sleep away.

In his age and in his eyes there was the weight of something that haunted him. Halliwell was what people called a soulful man, and she realized suddenly that this was what she liked about him.

It reminded her of Oliver.

He grunted as he sat up, then slowly climbed to his feet. Halliwell stretched his back and arms and neck with a groan of protest; his bones popped loudly as he moved. He took a deep breath and gazed at the sunrise, rubbing the back of his neck. All of this was done without a single glance at Julianna, as though he had forgotten she was there.

“I feel a hundred years old,” he said, without turning to her.

“You look it,” she replied.

Brows knitted, he turned and stared at her. Then his mouth twisted up into a smile and he chuckled softly. Some of the weight seemed to lift from him.

“I’ll bet I do.”

Julianna walked over and stood beside Halliwell, staring at the eastern horizon with him. “We’re really here.”

Halliwell paused, exhaled, and then nodded. “Yeah.”

“I have a weird question for you. I wouldn’t even ask it, but you seem a little less…freaked out…than you were yesterday.”

“Appearances are deceiving—” The detective turned to look at her and she saw the years in his blue eyes. “But what’s your question?”

“Like I said, it’s weird. But…okay, look, something has happened to us. We’re lost, somewhere so far from what we know that we might as well be stranded on the moon. For me, the urge to find Oliver is even more powerful than the need to get home; he’s the only man I’ve ever really loved.”