“Cause of death is cardiac arrest. Trauma of the injuries gave him a heart attack.”
“And his eyes?”
“Not here,” Becca replied.
Halliwell let the sheet drop and took a deep breath. What the hell had he gotten himself into? His mind began to pursue every possible avenue. Last night he had begun to wonder if Oliver Bascombe had thrown himself off the bluff in the middle of the blizzard, or gotten drunk and walked off accidentally, snowblind. But now he was certain that was not the case. He wondered if, somehow, Oliver had never left at all, had hidden away waiting for the opportunity to do this. The pieces didn’t all fit in his head, but at least it was a shape that had a certain logic to it. A rationale. And any kind of rationality was helpful at the moment.
Then he remembered the look on Collette Bascombe’s face. Her sincerity and sureness.
“Tell me about the sister, Peyton,” he said. “Any sign of foul play there?”
“Nothing,” Chief Bonaventure replied. “She’s just gone.”
Like her brother. Halliwell felt something unpleasant niggling at the back of his brain.
“But her car is still in the garage, isn’t it?”
The chief frowned and nodded. “Yes. But we figured her for a victim, Ted. Nobody’s thinking the girl drove away from here.”
No,
Halliwell thought.
But her brother didn’t drive away, either.
“What about clothes? She take anything with her?”
“Far as we can tell, she was in her bathrobe.”
Halliwell stared at Max Bascombe’s corpse. The man had had wealth and power and kept himself remarkably, obsessively healthy. Halliwell had thought him a hard-ass son of a bitch, but nobody deserved to die like this.
“You’ve got A.P.B.s out on Oliver and Collette?” he asked.
“Statewide,” Chief Bonaventure replied.
“All right. Let’s see what turns up,” Halliwell said, nodding slowly. “If he’s still alive, I would dearly love to have a conversation with Oliver Bascombe.”
He stared at the shrouded body on the floor, sure that even covered that way, even without eyes, the dead man was staring back.
* * *
Kitsune hardly left any tracks in the snow at all. Throughout the morning as they trekked northward through the forest in calf-deep snow, Oliver was drawn again and again to that observation. She seemed to walk on top of the snow, the only marks left by her passing a faint, indistinct impression and the occasional brush of her cloak on the new-fallen whiteness.
The memory of being carried away in the blizzard Frost had become still left him breathless. The winter man was intimidating under ordinary conditions, able to alter the shape of his body and to control the moisture in the air around him to a certain extent, but in wintry weather, his power was simply extraordinary. He was not invulnerable; the Falconer had proved that. But in the cold and the snow, Frost was more than formidable.
Not that such exertion was effortless. To create that blizzard and to rescue them had sapped much of his strength. Fortunately, the snowy weather and the cold were restoring him quickly.
They had been walking for hours in what Oliver presumed was a state forest, though which one he had no idea. The previous night he had been unable to determine the name of the town into which they had emerged. This morning he was not overly concerned with their location, only that they continued moving northward and that they remained within the boundaries of the state forest.
The lands on the other side of the Veil corresponded with public space on this side, old space, owned by no human and unused, unspoiled and free. Public parks and state forests, open wilderness and the ocean itself. Such free land was tied inextricably to the wildness of the magic that had not only created the Veil but infused all of the legendary beings who resided on the other side.
With the greedy sprawl of humanity, there was less and less of this land as time went by. Oliver wondered what this meant for the people of the Two Kingdoms, but that was one of a thousand questions he had for his companions and he supposed he would learn all he needed to know eventually. One question at a time.
They kept on through the forest, trudging in the snow. When they finally did cross back through the Veil, he wanted to be sure they had put some real distance between themselves and the Sandmen’s castle.
His muscles burned with the effort of slogging through the snow and his feet were wet and cold. The boots were waterproof, but that didn’t prevent snow from sliding down inside them and melting. What surprised him was how capable he was of accepting such discomfort. As children he and Collette had played in the snow for hours upon end and endured winds and temperatures that would have put them moments from serious frostbite, all without complaint. But as they had become adults, the resilience of childhood had left them. Or so Oliver had believed. Apparently, he was made of sterner stuff than he had come to imagine. It helped, of course, that the day was the warmest the region had seen in weeks— forty-five, at least— and the sun shone down amidst the bare winter branches and proud evergreens.
It was nothing short of a miracle to feel warm again. In the grip of the blizzard that the winter man had summoned to carry them away from the police, the cold had seemed all he would ever know. His mind had been muffled and numb, darkness closing in at the edges of his consciousness. Frost had swept Oliver and Kitsune away and into the woods, but even when they came to rest, it had taken long minutes for Oliver to shake off the chill that had dulled his thoughts and senses. He had his boots but no jacket— it had been left behind at the lake when he had first crossed the Veil— and his shirt was no protection from the elements.
Kitsune had been the one to find the cabin. Her senses were not at all human. They had struck out on a northerly course from the moment Oliver could manage to walk on his own, moving quietly through the woods until they were well outside the main area of town. Soon enough she was sniffing the air, and had located a small lake on the shore of which were spread half a dozen hunting cabins. Only one of them was occupied and enough distance separated them that it was half a mile from the most remote structure. That was the one they chose.
It had been all of the things he would have imagined of a real rustic cabin. There were two woodstoves but no other heat source, no electricity, and no running water. Instead of a stove, some enterprising and daring individual had rigged a barbecue grill with a propane tank just outside the rear door of the three-room cabin. It was crude as hell.
But there were beds and blankets and cans of deviled ham and SpaghettiOs in the cupboard. In a bureau, Oliver had found several sweaters and two old pairs of pants, and in the closet of the same room, a torn winter parka that must have been thirty years old. When he had slipped it on and found that it fit him, he laughed out loud with pleasure and relief.
Kitsune had woken him at dawn, the sensual scent of her musk filling the close air of the cabin’s shuttered interior. Her jade eyes had glowed in the dim morning light filtering through the window. There had been no real conversation. Oliver had breakfasted on deviled ham and taken the last of the cupboard’s old supplies— two cans of SpaghettiOs— and the can opener, and slipped them into the pockets of the musty-smelling parka. He’d gone out the back door of the cabin to piss in the woods, wondering where Frost had spent the night, and then they had set off.
Hours had passed. Oliver figured it was still morning, but based upon the position of the sun in the sky, it was sliding on toward noon. They had trudged for miles— or, rather, he had trudged while the other two moved through the snow without any difficulty whatsoever. A while back, as the day had grown warmer and the snow began to melt, he had removed his parka and now carried it slung over one shoulder. His feet were still cold and numb but his face and hands were warm enough and his body was heated by the exertion.
Every hour or so they paused to let Oliver catch his breath and lean against a tree for a few minutes, but he could see the restlessness of his companions. A dozen times he thought to press them on the source of that anxiety, but he was consumed by his own concerns and left them to speak in their own time.
Memories of his home haunted him. The scents and sounds and comfort of the house on Rose Ridge Lane accompanied him on that journey through the woods of northern Maine. Melting snow dripped off skeletal branches and the needles of pine trees, glistening in the sun, and he remembered a lifetime of Decembers in the house on the oceanside bluff in Kitteridge. In particular, his mind went back again and again to his mother’s parlor, before the blizzard and the winter man. He thought of Christmas lights and gauzy, sepia-toned memories of his mother.
How could it be that his memories had more heft and substance and immediacy to him than the events of the past two days? Yet it was true. The world beyond the Veil had crystallized in his mind and he accepted the reality of it. It was fantastic, without question, but there was nothing dreamlike about his experiences there. He had felt the roughness of the terrain, the texture of things there: tree bark, the grit of the Sandmen’s castle, the scratch of branches as he moved through the forest.
Now he was in his own world. The
real
world. He was still a target, still hunted, just as if he himself were one of the Borderkind, so he knew the danger involved in attempting to stay behind. Oliver had no choice but to forge ahead. The regret, the longing to stay here in the world he knew and understood, was sharp and profound. Though he relished the recent collision of his life with the extraordinary and the impossible, this exposure to the familiar made him hesitate.
Despite all of that, the world seemed surreal. The events of the previous night with the skating rink and the train station, with the murder of a little girl and their flight from the police, felt as though they had happened to someone else. It was one thing for him to pass through the Veil and witness the wonders there, but entirely another to be wandering the north woods on a December morning with an exotic shape-shifter and Jack Frost.
So he held on to those memories of his hometown and the house where he had grown up. As distant as they felt from him now, they were all that seemed real. And he needed that.
The longer they walked, the less real it all seemed to him. The forest was pristine with the recent snowfall, the sky a perfect blue. The colors were so rich and the air so pure that Oliver felt as though this was the world of magic and myth, that there was really little difference between what he knew and what existed beyond the Veil. As if he could pass through to the other side just by looking out the corner of his eye, by stepping at a certain angle past an ancient tree.
As tired as he was, it was not the ache in his legs that brought him to a stop this time. Kitsune was far enough ahead that he could only make out the shape of her, crouched upon the snow, and the sunlight on her bright orange-red fur. He could not have said, in that moment, whether she wore the form of woman or fox, and understood that it did not matter.
The winter man’s blue-white eyes had been distant throughout the morning. Now he seemed to sense something beyond exhaustion in Oliver, for he tilted his head, icicles of hair cascading to one side with a strange December music, and studied his friend.
Friend.
What a strange word. Oliver wondered if he and Frost truly were friends, or if only the debt between them kept the winter man at his side. He found he preferred not having an answer to the question.
“Are you all right?” Frost asked.
Oliver leaned against the nearest tree and put his head back against rough bark, dropping his parka on the snow. The question was vast, the possible answers infinite. But he knew Frost was not asking about his general well-being.
“I’m going to need a longer rest soon,” he admitted, rasping his palms across the stubble on his cheeks, the friction connecting him more to the present and stealing him away from his musing.
“It should be safe to make a border-crossing now,” the winter man replied. “It will be warmer there. And by now the Hunters have made their way to the village we visited last night and will be pursuing us here. If the Falconer is among them, they will have no trouble tracking us. If we are to stop for any length of time, it would be best to be on the other side of the Veil.”
When the sun hit him at a particular angle, Frost was partially translucent. Oliver found it difficult not to stare at the beauty of it.
“Sounds logical,” he replied, but his thoughts were elsewhere. With a frown he ran his fingers through his hair and held his arms against the sides of his head, mind going back to the skating rink from the night before and the yellow police tape roping it off from the rest of the park.
“What troubles you, Oliver?”
He glanced up at Frost. “At the moment?”
The winter man nodded.
“The Sandman.” Oliver studied him. “He’s here, somewhere. Murdered that little girl last night. The police up here aren’t going to know how to contend with that. How can they, when they have no idea what they’re up against?”
