Oliver felt a tightening in his gut that had nothing to do with seasickness. “I never realized.” He frowned, troubled, but said nothing more. If all went as he hoped, Frost should be free to drift with the storm for a while before they all traveled through the Veil again. And if not . . . well, Oliver didn’t think he had to worry about Frost losing track of the danger they were in, not with his grief for Yuki-Onna still fresh.
When the captain brought the boat up to the dock at Canna Island, Blue Jay helped tie them up to the moorings. The dock was located within a natural inlet, so the surf was calmer there, but still they knocked against the rubber bumpers hanging from the pier. Oliver was sure he saw a familiar figure in the falling snow, just for a moment. The winter man had been watching them. But when he stepped off onto the dock and glanced around, he saw no sign of Frost. Blue Jay and Kitsune followed and the fox-woman linked her arm with his as though to steady herself. Her features were drawn but her eyes were alight with relief now that they were off the boat.
Captain Moncreiffe followed them onto the dock, hat pulled down tight on his head and coat buttoned up around his throat. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and peered at them through the falling snow.
Beyond him, Gong Gong sat on top of the wheelhouse. The snow seemed to move aside as though it did not dare to fall upon the Black Dragon of Storms. Oliver did his best to ignore the little creature, forcing himself to look at Moncreiffe’s face.
“Mr. Bascombe, you’ve got three hours. Weather report says the storm’s meant to subside a bit toward noon, but afterward she’s going to get much worse. I’ll want to be back to the mainland by then.”
Oliver nodded. “Absolutely. We’ll be back.”
“Captain Moncreiffe,” Kitsune said, jade eyes peering out from beneath her hood with a light of their own, “you’re certain you cannot direct us to Professor Koenig’s home?”
The Scotsman had a twinkle in his eyes when he looked at her, but then he offered an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry, miss. I wouldn’t know where he lives. Anyone on the island ought to be able to tell you, though. Why, it’s tiny, after all. Can’t be more than twenty people living out here, all told. Stop at the first cottage with a light burning inside and you’ll have your answers. Best hurry along, though.”
He glanced warily skyward. For a moment he frowned and his eyes seemed to track something odd he might have seen in the snow above. Then he shook his head, his expression bemused. When Oliver glanced at the wheelhouse, Gong Gong was gone, and he could only imagine what Captain Moncreiffe thought he had seen in the storm.
“I have an old friend on the island. Perhaps
acquaintance
is more apt. But we’re acquainted enough that he’ll spare me a cup of tea and a scone and a warm place to sit while I wait on you.”
Blue Jay started down the dock ahead of them. Kitsune and Oliver turned together and started toward the small village that lay ahead, church steeples stark against the storming gray sky. Several inches of fresh powder lay on the ground and Oliver was grateful for his boots. Blue Jay and Kitsune seemed hardly to notice at all.
As they drew nearer, trekking through the snow, the cottages became more than shapes in the gentle whiteness of the storm. Oliver’s heels crunched on the powder but otherwise the village seemed entirely silent. So quiet, in fact, that he could hear the snow fall.
“I don’t understand,” Oliver said.
Blue Jay slowed to fall into step with them. “What’s that?”
“The churches.” He counted at least three steeples jutting up into the whitewashed sky. “Why are there only a handful of people here? Why are so many cottages empty? And if there’s at best a couple of dozen people, what do they need so many churches for?”
The island was quite small. According to the woman who had arranged for the boat charter to begin with, it measured five miles long and two miles wide. But that was enough for a much larger population, and from the look of the village, once upon a time things had been different on the Isle of Canna. The first few cottages they came to were dark and appeared deserted. One had its windows boarded. The roof of the other had collapsed at some point and never been repaired, and the winter had claimed it.
“Perhaps the ones who live here now are Newcomers. Either that, or they were left behind.” Kitsune nudged a bit closer to Oliver, still walking arm in arm with him.
“You can feel it?” Blue Jay asked.
Kitsune nodded. “It is empty here. As though thriving life has been erased. Or vanished.”
Oliver paused, breaking away from them, turning to face them. “Hold on. What are you saying? You mean nobody’s here?”
“You misunderstand,” Kitsune told him, her face nearly lost in the shadow of her hood. “There are people who live here, just as Captain Moncreiffe said. But once this was a real village. Now it is nearly a ghost town. You yourself asked about the churches. Where did those people go? There is a feeling about the place, a hollowness, that suggests it might not have been attrition. They might have been Lost. Slipped through the Veil.”
Oliver shoved his hands into the pockets of his wool coat, shivering. “Like Roanoke.”
“Something like that,” Blue Jay replied, but his attention was not on them. He scanned the snowy sky, presumably for sign of Gong Gong or Frost.
Oliver did the same. He knew there was every reason why the two Borderkind who could not disguise themselves as human had to remain out of sight, but it troubled him just the same.
They continued into the village, passing a sort of park on the left that a sign identified as a Viking burial ground, but under the blanket of new-fallen snow they could see little evidence of the ancient graves. The island was thickly wooded and there were trees even in the midst of the village. Near a stand of towering oak and rowan, all of them stripped to bare branches by winter, a massive Celtic cross jutted from the ground like a cemetery headstone. There were chips out of the crossbar and the cross was ancient and weathered. Nothing around it indicated that it was a grave marker, or supplied any other origin, for that matter. It was simply old, a memory of another age standing in the midst of this diminishing settlement.
“Oliver,” Kitsune said.
He looked up to see her pointing toward the cottage beyond that cross. The was light in several of the windows, he suspected from a generator. Even as he began to walk toward the cottage with Kitsune and Blue Jay, aware of what an odd trio the three of them would present to whoever lived there, he saw the dark figure of Gong Gong sweeping down out of the storm to alight on the snowy ledge of the cottage’s chimney. It set him somewhat at ease.
“Frost,” he whispered to the falling snow around him. “Are you here?”
The only response was the crunch of snow under his boots.
“He’s here,” Blue Jay assured him. “I told you, he’s just distracted. Let’s just find your professor. The boat isn’t going to wait forever.”
Oliver nodded and took one last glance up at Gong Gong before striding up to the cottage and rapping heavily on the door. As he waited with his companions he brushed snow from his hair and shook it from his coat.
He didn’t have to knock a second time. With a rattling of the handle, the door was hauled open by a sixtyish woman who might once have been beautiful. There was a hardness about her features now, but Oliver thought that had not always been the case. When she smiled at the sight of them, he was startled. He’d been prepared to quickly explain their presence, but she did not seem alarmed by the arrival of three strangers upon her doorstep in the middle of a December storm, despite the remoteness of the island.
“Not the best weather to be out on the water, I’d say.”
Oliver could not help being charmed by her. “You’d be right, ma’am. And our time is short because the storm’s supposed to get worse. Captain Moncreiffe wants to get back to the mainland by lunch, and—”
“Ach, well, that’d be Barclay, all right. Though I’d guess he’s more worried about missing lunch than he is about any storm,” the woman said. “Right. Well, what can I do for ya, then? Didn’t come all this way to look at Viking graves or for some monastic retreat like the fellas were out here in September.”
Kitsune drew back her hood. The old woman blinked and stared closely at her, perhaps drawn by those jade eyes. Or perhaps there was something else she recognized in the face of the fox-woman, for she studied Blue Jay more closely and a grim intelligence lit her expression.
“We’re looking for a man named David Koenig. A professor. We’re told he lives on the island. I wonder if you could point us in the right direction?” Oliver asked.
The woman nodded thoughtfully, turning her gaze back to Blue Jay. “Mischief in your eyes, son.”
“And in yours, mother.”
Most women would have been taken aback at the reply, unless they were somehow aware that in some Native American cultures it was a sign of respect to call older women
mother
. Yet this odd, formidable woman only nodded as though his response was confirmation of some profound suspicion.
“Just beyond the Presbyterian church, along that way, behind the bigger building with the fancy porch— used to be a market once, long time ago— there’s a rock wall runs along a path. Won’t be able to see the path in this weather, of course, but if you follow the wall it’ll take you to a pretty little gate. In warmer weather, the professor keeps a fine garden. ’Tis his gate, you see. The cottage on t’other side belongs to him.”
Oliver didn’t ask if they might find the professor home. Where else would the man go? They thanked her and started off, and Oliver noticed that she kept watching them until they lost sight of the cottage in the storm. He wondered if she kept on gazing after them even after the snow had obscured her view.
They wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the Presbyterian church and the other two— whatever denominations they had once been home to— except that the former market with the “fancy porch” was unmistakable. Other than the churches and what had clearly once been a pub or inn of some sort but was now as hollow as so many of the island’s structures, it was the only building of any size. The rock wall was the sort that had been built to mark land boundaries in another age. Snow had built up on top, but it was not nearly deep enough to hide masonry. They followed along beside it on what they presumed was the path the old woman had mentioned, and at the end they did indeed find the gate, a delicate white-picket thing that seemed absurdly out of place in such inhospitable terrain.
Oliver suspected that in the summer, with the flowers in his garden in full bloom, Professor Koenig’s gate and the fence that ran along the perimeter of his property would have seemed far more appropriate, even quaint.
He paused in front of the gate.
“What are you waiting for?” Blue Jay asked, and when Oliver looked at him the trickster’s laughing eyes were dark with uncharacteristic impatience.
Kitsune seemed to understand his reluctance, however. She pushed the gate open and turned toward him. “At least you will have an answer. Even if it is not the answer you hope for.”
He nodded and followed her, the three of them passing through the gate. At the door, both of the Borderkind looked at him expectantly. There came a hissing from the air above him and Oliver looked up to see Gong Gong gliding to the ground, body slipping serpentine upon the winds. The dragon seemed thinner as it flew, but upon landing it appeared quite the same as when he had first seen it. The snow was not avoiding him as it had earlier, but the lightning sparks in Gong Gong’s eyes gave off enough heat that as the flakes touched his face, they melted.
“Aren’t you going to knock?” the dragon asked.
Oliver stared at him. “Where’s Frost?”
The dragon spread his wings and shook them before curling them against his body once more. His tufts of hair and beard were wild from the storm and his expression pulled back now into a kind of snarl.
“Look around, you fool. He’s everywhere.”
Oliver took a long breath and knocked on the door. It had been Frost who had drawn him into this. Much as he admired and respected Kitsune, Oliver had seen that Frost carried a greater weight of authority when speaking to other Borderkind. Not that Koenig was one of them. He was just a man. But even Kitsune deferred to Frost, and it would have been better to have him there.
The knock was muffled by the falling snow. Seconds went by without any response from within, though there was the dim glow of a lamp in the window farthest to the right. Despite that it was still morning— no later than ten o’clock— the day was so dark with storm that a light inside was no surprise.
“Oliver,” Kitsune urged.
He nodded and knocked again, but lightly.
“Fuck this,” Gong Gong snorted, and he stepped forward and began to kick at the bottom of the door so fiercely that it shook in its frame.
Blue Jay had to step in front of him and nudge him away with one shoe. “Enough of that. You’ll terrify the man. He’ll never open his—”
