“The Vittora is your guide . . . it is the luck that stays with you throughout your life, only manifesting itself when it prepares to leave. Most people never see it, but here . . . anything is possible.”
She refused to stare into those empty eyes, instead watching that tremulous light. “Why is it . . . leaving?” she managed.
“The Vittora leaves when it senses that its host is soon to die.”
Collette felt as though some part of her gave way, some central bit of her structure, and she collapsed in upon herself. She wanted to weep, but dehydration would not allow it. Her tongue moistened her chapped lips.
“Why?” she wailed. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“The past is a dream from which we never wake,” he said. Words she had heard before.
The boy moved two steps nearer. She cringed but did not bother to move away. She was crippled by anguish, but also by the knowledge that she had nowhere to run. Still she refused to look into those hellishly empty eyes.
“You should scream more,” the boy said.
The Vittora sighed and whispered, but she could no longer make out the words.
“Really, you ought to. That will bring things to a conclusion more quickly. If you scream enough, perhaps your brother will sense you, and he will come. And that will bring the end.”
“My . . .”
Collette went cold, entirely numb. She turned and faced the eyeless, colorless boy. “What do you know about my brother?”
The child’s voice became a kind of sigh. “Olllliver.” He smiled, laughed quietly, and sand spilled from his ragged sockets. “You asked why. He is the reason you are here. They freed the Sandman, Collette, do you not understand? Your father’s murder was a message, and you are the lure to bring Oliver here. They sensed something about him from the moment he passed through the Veil. They sense the same thing in you. And I can feel it as well. You both must be eliminated. And so he will come here, for you, with his traveling companions, and you will all be destroyed.”
She shook her head in denial, revolted by these dark intentions, plans she barely understood. And yet a part of her was gleeful. Oliver was alive, just as she had believed.
“So we shall wait for him. And while we wait, the Sandman visits your world . . . and he plays.”
With a grin that showed jagged teeth like broken concrete and sprinkled sand once more from the hollows in his face, the boy reached into both pockets and brought forth two handfuls of wet, gleaming, bloody eyeballs, each trailing a slick nerve tail.
Collette could not even scream. Instead she just scrambled away from him on the sand until her back hit the solid wall. Grit showered down from above, sliding down the back of her shirt. The floor of the chamber buckled and heaved and hands thrust up from the sand, more children crawling from the ground beneath her, all of them eyeless like the first.
But the Vittora, the light of her luck and life, was still there. It flickered weakly, but it had not yet abandoned her.
She held her breath and tried to look away but she could not. There were four children now, two girls and two boys, all nearly featureless, blanched, and dry. When they moved it was a dry rasp, and now they stood together, staring at her without eyes.
And in their midst, a figure began to rise. A figure she had seen before, cloaked in shuddering gray, body flowing, features thin and jagged, eyes that terrible lemon yellow. He grinned with those tiny, jagged teeth.
The Sandman.
He opened his arms, smiling at her, and then he reached out and touched the children one by one, and one by one they collapsed into nothing but piles of shifting sand. Nothing but sand.
“I see you,”
he said, tapping one long finger just below a sickly yellow eye.
“Oliver will come soon. And then we play.”
Even after he was gone, she could not tear her gaze from the place where he had stood, from the little mounds of sand where the children had been. In the dark she was sure she could still see those lemon eyes.
Above her, the Vittora gleamed dimly, and its soft whispers rasped like the breeze across the sand.
* * *
Oliver kept his hand on the phone for a moment, Julianna’s voice ringing in his ears, word of his father’s murder knitting a stitch in his chest. He stared in disbelief through the red-framed glass panes of the phone booth at Frost. His mind was disconnected from the sight. This was London. The real world. It was early morning maybe a week before Christmas and there were people all over the place. The sight was so visually dissonant that he felt locked in that place, trapped in the phone booth, though perhaps that was his secret wish, that he might hide there.
But there was to be no hiding place.
A scream tore the air on that fine, crisp morning, loud enough that it penetrated easily through the walls of the phone booth. Oliver’s senses came alive, his skin prickling with awareness, his gaze sweeping the world around him. Kitsune was limping toward them, bloodstained hand clutching her abdomen, a spill-trail of crimson behind her. Blue Jay followed with the still, ebony form of Gong Gong in his arms. The dragon looked like some kind of carving, a statue in the trickster’s arms.
A mother pushing her child in a pram had turned a corner and nearly run into Kitsune as she staggered out through the gate of Battersea Park. The woman had almost hit her and as Kitsune passed, the back of her fur cloak had brushed across the blanket covering the baby’s legs. On the blanket now was a bright red stain of fresh blood. The woman knelt by the pram, tugged the blanket away and threw it to the ground. She stared after Kitsune and Blue Jay, shouting angrily.
Others were beginning to pay attention. A pair of men who’d been doing work on the electrical box on a lamppost twenty yards along the sidewalk were walking quickly toward the corner now, their attention on the woman. But in seconds that would change.
Jack Frost stood like an ice sculpture in the midst of that London neighborhood, quite obviously alive, his eyes filled with frustration and anger, his mouth split open to reveal those jagged frozen teeth.
None of this was supposed to happen. The Borderkind were not meant to be seen like this. The world would not believe in legends anymore. Whatever came of it would be ugly, and it would stop him from getting to Professor Koenig . . . never mind figuring out what had happened to Collette. If he ended up in a cell somewhere, the Myth Hunters would find a way to get to him. He’d be a bloody smear on concrete.
“No,” he whispered, and then he was moving.
Oliver slammed out the door of the phone booth hard enough to shatter two of the glass panes. Kitsune was nearly upon him. The pain etched in her face hurt him, but he turned to Frost.
“Can you close her wounds?”
The winter man frowned but he nodded, icicle hair clinking. The sky had begun to darken, the sun obscured by a gathering storm that might have been the onset of Frost’s wrath or the power of the Black Dragon of Storms.
“She’ll heal on her own,” Frost said. “She needs only a handful of minutes.”
“Oi! What the fuck you doing?” shouted one of the electrical workers.
“Come on, Keith,” the other said, trying to pull his mate away. “Some kind of television bollocks, yeah? Don’t get involved.”
Oliver ignored their continued comments and the people who had obviously seen the Borderkind go by and were emerging cautiously from the park, gathering like curious birds, whispering to one another. The mother with the pram left the bloody blanket behind and began to retreat . . . but then she paused and pulled a mobile phone from her purse.
“Oh, shit,” Oliver growled, shaking his head. He shoved a finger at Frost’s face. “We don’t have a minute. She needs to stop bleeding right now.”
The anger that flickered across the winter man’s face was gone in an instant. Frost stepped toward Kitsune and pulled her into his chilling embrace. She grunted and hissed through her teeth in pain. The winter man slid a hand beneath her cloak and she let him touch her wound. Ice spread across the fabric of her black tunic, the blood that soaked it freezing solid. Kitsune hissed again but the pain in her face seemed to ease.
“This will do more damage at the moment, but it will stop the bleeding for now.”
“Numb,” Kitsune managed. “Thank you.”
Blue Jay joined them, carrying Gong Gong as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. More people were shouting at them. There had to be a dozen just outside the gate to the park and three or four behind the electricians, as well as a pair of elderly women standing by the young mother with the pram. Cars began to beep angrily as motorists stopped to get a glimpse of the impossible unfolding in Battersea Park.
“Look here, what the hell d’you think you’re doing? What
is
that thing?” snapped the fiercely red-faced electrician.
“Keith,” his partner cautioned.
But Keith wouldn’t be swayed. He started toward them, something nobody else gathered around watching the freak show was willing to do. Maybe he just couldn’t believe what he was seeing, thought Frost was some kind of illusion or gimmick. That didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. In his way, perhaps he was more afraid than anyone else . . . so afraid that the only way to combat that fear was to confront it.
“Oliver—” Frost began.
“No,” Oliver snapped, staring at him, forcing the winter man to look him in the eye. “This is my world now. None of this can happen. We can’t afford it, not any of us. You need to be gone. Right now.
Gone.
”
The winter man might have given the slightest nod, and then he was, indeed, gone. Icy wind shook Oliver where he stood and a trace of snow swirled around his feet.
“Bloody hell, did you see that?” called another man.
But it was women’s voices that cut in to Oliver’s thoughts. He heard them chattering to one another and several of them cried out in surprise and alarm. Several people smiled, thinking it some kind of trick, or a show. Oliver considered playing off that, trying to make it seem like they were street performers or something, but it was only a glancing thought. There had been too much blood.
He took Kitsune’s arm to help her stand up straight and she grimaced but managed to walk beside him. Blue Jay wore an amused expression, somehow enjoying the chaos, and still made no effort to hide Gong Gong from the crowd. The three of them began to walk away from the crowd gathered round the phone booth. The light had changed but cars were still stopped. Horns honked. The trio of strange arrivals to this neighborhood crossed the street as hurriedly as Kitsune could manage.
“Hang on! Where you think you’re off to, now? There’s blood back here!” the electrician called.
Persistent, he started across the street after them. Some of the people at the park’s exit began to move as though they might also follow. Oliver wasn’t having that. He snarled over his shoulder.
“Fuck off, Keith!”
The man actually recoiled at hearing his name come from this stranger. It gave him pause. Oliver used the moment to get them out of there. He started walking north with Kitsune and Blue Jay and he could see the bridge over the Thames River not far off.
“This day only gets more interesting,” Blue Jay said.
Oliver glanced over his shoulder and saw that several cars were pacing them, people gawking out the windows in paparazzi-like fascination. He cursed under his breath and tried to get Kitsune to pick up the pace.
“I’m sorry, but if we aren’t a lot less conspicuous by the time the police show up, this is going to get even messier.”
“It’s all right,” she muttered, taking long, slow breaths. “Already I’m starting to heal.”
“Hello! Hello!” shouted a voice from a passing car. The passenger hanging out the window had a camera.
Oliver turned his face away. Saw Gong Gong again, so still in Blue Jay’s arms. Then he glanced up at the trickster. “Is there anything you can do? A glamour or something, make them see something else, make us invisible to them?”
The feathers in his hair blew in the cold December wind and for the first time Oliver realized that it had begun to snow. Flakes dotted Blue Jay’s thick black hair and rested upon his narrow shoulders.
“ ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for?’ ” Blue Jay asked with a smirk. “That sort of thing?”
It jarred Oliver to hear those familiar words come from the Borderkind’s mouth, but he nodded. “Something like that.”
“Not a chance. I’m no sorcerer. I know a few tricks, that’s all,” Blue Jay said. As he walked, he shifted the burden of Gong Gong into his left arm and reached with his right hand to touch Kitsune’s bloody cloak. He ran his fingers down over her fur.
When he pulled his hand away, the blood was gone. Oliver glanced down and saw that her blood-soaked tunic was also now restored.
“Just a trick,” Blue Jay said, and now there was no more amusement in his face, but a kind of stoic regret.
