Briar Queen (36 page)

“So they're both there now, at the station?” Finn glanced out the window as if she could glimpse MossHeart Station through the forest. “BatSong and the tree girl?”

“They're both there now,” Lily finished.

Finn felt the elixir like cold electricity within her, glimpsed her eyes silvering slightly in the rearview mirror.

JACK TURNED OFF THE ROAD
and stopped in front of an octagonal building of green marble scrawled with more graffiti and nestled in creepers and giant ferns. Rusting railroad tracks snaked around it into a wilderness of redwoods and fir trees. The station's stained-glass windows were grimed with so much lichen, they looked black. Scarlet fungus streaked the walls like an infection.

As they stepped out of the car, Lily reached out and gripped Finn's hand. Jack began walking toward the building. Leander and Moth flanked the sisters as Jack led the way up the stairs to the metal door engraved with stylized images of bats. He tried the handle, brushed his fingertips across the rusting lock.

“We don't need to get in, do we? All we need to do is wait for the train.” Finn's voice faded when Jack shook his head and stepped back.

“At this little-used place, we'll need to summon the guardian. You have a key.”

Finn lifted the dragonfly key Hester Kierney had given her from its chain around her neck. She studied it and uneasily remembered that the Black Scissors created keys from living things. She moved to Jack's side, inserted the key into the lock. Apprehension swept over her as the door opened.

They stepped into a high-ceilinged lobby littered with leaf wrack and the bones of tiny animals. Wooden benches sagged beneath colonies of toadstools. Lamps of black metal rusted on walls painted with faded murals of Victorian advertisements for soap and bicycles and typewriters. In the center grew a tree, black even to its leaves, its roots cracking the marble floor, its branches strung with hundreds of red and green glass beads that glowed in the dusky light.

“That's it?” Finn breathed. “An elder tree . . .”

As she and Jack approached the tree, the glass beads became incandescent. Finn curled her hands to keep from reaching out and touching one of the beads. Her skin began to warm in the glow from the tree as threads of light ebbed outward. Jack, studying the tree with concern, said, “She's become a guardian between the lands of the living and the dead.”

“We are caught between mortal and not.” Lily moved forward. “And getting back is not as easy as arriving.”

In Finn's hand, the dragonfly key whirred to life, a silvery thing that shot forward into the darkness beyond the tree. In that dark, Finn thought she glimpsed a young man's white face and long black hair—she remembered the photo of Thomas Luneht on Sylvie's wall.

The tree continued to exude tendrils of ruby and emerald light, but the only sound was the
whirr
of the dragonfly's wings in the dark. Watching the jeweled tree shimmer to life, Finn became aware of a thundering pulse beneath their feet and remembered Jack telling her about the river of blood that ran beneath this land, blood from all the mortal battles on earth.

A voice whispered:
You are not welcome here
.

A sudden vacuum of hostile cold struck Finn down to her bones.
No,
she thought.
Not when we're so close
.

“
Ialtag Amrhan
.” Jack spoke the guardian's name. “We are here to return to the true world.”

The shadows birthed a statuesque young man in a sleeveless robe of inky fur,
his hair a mane of tangled black, his eyes an acid green. His arms were gloved to the elbow in red.

“And what does that have to do with me?” The guardian bared curved teeth. “Why do any of you want to enter the mortal world?” His gaze slid over each of them. “Is there a mortal among you that I can't scent?”

Moth idly reached for the knives hidden in his hoodie. Jack rubbed the back of his neck, his hand in close proximity to the grip of the jackal walking stick/sword strapped across his back.

When Finn stepped forward, Lily grabbed for her hand and Moth swore beneath his breath. Finn said, “What was her name?”

No one moved. The guardian was as still as a statue. He slowly looked at the tree. His voice scraped out, “Miriam.”

“We're going to kill Seth Lot,” Finn told him. “Let us back to the true world. The Wolf will follow, eventually, and we'll kill him there.” She glanced at the whispering tree. “And you'll be able to free
her
.”

She returned her attention to the guardian and flinched—his bloody hands were cupping an object made out of twigs, moss, and red creepers.

“Take it,” he whispered. “My heart. Break it, and you'll summon the train that runs between the borders.”

She moved toward the Fata and placed her hands over his bloody ones. Carefully, she accepted the fragile object, stepped back. She didn't take her gaze from him as she snapped the Fata heart in two.

There was a sound like a glacier cracking. The air became sweet with ivy, clover, and berries. The tree's black leaves lightened to emerald and the beads of glass began to tremble.

As a sigh drifted through the air, the guardian vanished and the dragonfly whirred from the shadows and out the door.

The whistle of a train shattered the silence. They ran onto the platform.

A train as derelict as the station, laced with rust, forged from black metal tinged with ivy-green and streaked with the red light of a Ghostlands day, was thundering down the tracks. It was the most gorgeous thing Finn had ever seen.

“The dragonfly,” she said faintly. “
Thomas Luneht
was the lover of BatSong's mortal girl.”

Jack, watching the train approach, reached out and clasped one of her hands. “I always wondered why Reiko and Lot split in the '70s. Lot ordered Caliban to murder Thomas Luneht, one of her blessed.”

Finn pictured a smiling Thomas Luneht and a black-haired girl kissing in a field dancing with dragonflies. She felt snarly.

The train creaked and groaned and halted with a terrible screech like a dying dragon. The singed air stung her nostrils. The doors slammed open and a few bolts and screws clattered to the tracks.

Lily whispered, “We're going home.”

Finn gripped one of Lily's hands. “Yes.”

Moth was the first to step up into the train. He reached down for Lily.

When Leander shouted, Finn glanced over her shoulder. A large white shape was running toward them, its muzzle curled back from a cage of teeth. She spoke the name like a curse, “
Crom cu
.”

“Hurry!” Moth held the doors open as Jack and Leander pushed Finn and Lily up the steps.

Caliban materialized from the pale hyena as if he'd shed white shadows. His gray coat billowing, he loped toward the station.

“Go!
Go!
” Jack yelled. Leander leaped up into the train. Jack followed.

Caliban halted, raised an arm, and aimed a revolver of white metal. A shot cracked out.

Finn and Leander grabbed Jack as the doors began to close. As Jack dove in and the doors hissed shut behind him, a second bullet struck the metal. The train lurched forward.

Jack pushed to his feet. “It seems the
crom cu
has left old school behind.”

“Jack.” Moth was somber. “You're bleeding.”

Finn pushed aside Jack's coat and saw the hole in his shirt and the fresh blood. But the bullet wound was already closing. He lifted a bloody projectile between two fingers and she winced—it was a human molar. She met his gaze as relief mixed with dismay in her head and heart.

Moth said to Jack, “We need to make sure whoever else is on this train isn't going to be a problem.”

“And if they are?” Lily was watching Jack.

“Then they're getting off this train.” Jack stepped back. “Finn. Lily. We won't
be long.” As Moth and Leander strode down the aisle, Jack said to Finn, “Do you still have the silver dagger?”

“Yes.”

“Use it if you need to, on anything that enters.” He turned to follow Leander and Moth.

Finn dropped into the seat beside Lily, her mind blank, her body numb. Desperately, she said, “You're real, Lily, aren't you?”

Lily took the silver dagger from Finn. Before Finn could stop her, she'd sliced the ball of her thumb. As red blood welled, she met Finn's gaze. “I'm real. I had to tell myself that, every day, in that house. And if it weren't for Leander and Moth, I would have lost my mind. Time is different there. I feel like I've been away for
years
. I can't wait to get home”—she huddled in the seat, her knees drawn up beneath her chin as she looked out of the window—“and see Dad, and walk on the beach and go to the park and Fisherman's Wharf . . .”

Finn had forgotten to tell Lily that they'd moved. “Um . . . do you remember Gran Rose? She died, after you . . . Well, Da and I moved into her house in New York.”

“That big old place?” Lily turned in her seat to face Finn. “In Fair Hollow? Huh. Gran Rose died . . . I barely remember her.” Her eyes were dark, and Finn, who couldn't imagine what terrible memories might be slivered into her sister's brain, curled her hands into fists in her lap. Lily let her head fall back against the seat and said, “We didn't have a chance, did we? Leander smiled at me and pretended to be normal—even when I began to suspect. And Seth . . . all he had to do was look at me.” She hung her head and her long hair veiled her face. “And promise to make me a queen of night and nothing.”

Gently, Finn said, “Leander loves you, Lily.”

“They're so good at pretending, Finn.”

“Do you remember what you said . . . that night . . . ‘They call us things with teeth.'”

Lily's mouth curved. “I got that from the first Fata I ever met.
Norn
.”

“I've met her.”

“You have?”

“She was part of Reiko's . . . family.”

“It's the first thing Norn said when I saw her. It was in the woods in Vermont and
the sun was setting and she came walking toward me like some kind of rebel angel, in jeans, tattooed and barefoot. And she said, ‘Hello, little thing with teeth.'”

Finn shivered, imagining the Viking Fata girl approaching the child version of her sister.

“Mom told me once”—Lily's voice was soft as she gazed out the window—“that the first life-forms on earth to grow teeth were, technically, going to become the first humans. And Fatas, well, they were probably the first life-forms, right, but they're all spirit. But they can make themselves solid. And some use their teeth to—”

Lily went silent.

“Tickets, misses?” A figure dropped into the seat opposite them and Finn almost stabbed him with the silver dagger.

The Black Scissors smiled. He looked as if he'd just stepped from a neo-western in his black duster and wide-brimmed hat banded with bird skulls. He said, “Good evening, Misses Sullivan. I see you've broken all the rules to achieve your desires, as usual.”

Gripping the arms of her seat, Lily straightened. “
You
.”

“You know him . . .” Finn glanced at her sister.

The Black Scissors touched his hat brim. “We're acquainted. Has the Wolf stopped howling?”

“Why don't you go check?” Finn scowled. “And how did you get on this train? Cruithnear told us it's a ghost train between the Ghostlands and the realm of the dead.”

“The realm of the dead”—his mouth twisted—“doesn't bother me. I walk the borders. The dead and I have an
understanding
.”

“Finn, don't be rude.” Lily Rose tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned slightly forward. “Did you really expect my sister and her gorgeous boyfriend to kill the Wolf? We barely escaped. Why don't you grow a pair and kill him yourself?”

Finn looked from Lily to the Black Scissors. The Black Scissors said lightly, “I couldn't get near him. Believe me, I've tried. I gave your sister and Jack the
means
to kill him, but I didn't expect them to be assassins.”

“Sylvie and Christie could have
died,
” Finn said.

“They could die in the true world, too, Finn Sullivan. Now, they'll be helpful comrades to you and Jack when the time comes.”

“Finn,” Lily said. “Don't hit him.”

“A girl named Hester Kierney found your key. She's
dead
. You used Moth and turned
him
into a key
—
and Thomas Luneht—what did you do to
him
?”

“I'm sorry about Hester Kierney—that was not my doing. However much that dragonfly key would have helped you,
I
didn't lure Miss Kierney into the Ghostlands. But someone did . . . someone who knew what that key was and wanted it in the possession of a girl who could only get it to you at the very moment you needed it. As for Moth, he was without memory or any sense of what he was when I found him, shimmering with the remnants of Fata enchantment. He was a void, as if someone had sculpted a persona around nothing. And Thomas . . . well, he's still fighting. He agreed to become an object of power for you . . .”

“So you turned him into a
key
?”

“To
help
you, Miss Sullivan. I've done these things to
help
you.”

“You did them to help
yourself
.”

“Miss Sullivan . . . what do you think your chances are against the Wolf when he comes to the true world?”

“Home team advantage.” She felt everything go quiet inside of her. “Are you going to be here when the menfolk return? I wouldn't advise it.”

The Black Scissors and Lily exchanged a look that send a chill through Finn, as if she'd just discovered a dark secret between them. How well
did
they know each other?

“Why, exactly, are you here?” Finn spoke softly.