Ghost Story (67 page)

I repeated that cycle for several moments, my entire reality consumed by the simple struggle to breathe and to avoid the pain. I was on the losing side of things, and if the pain didn't exactly lessen, it did, eventually, become more bearable.

“Good,” whispered a dry, rasping voice. “Very good.”

I felt the rest of my body next. I was lying on something cool and contoured. It wasn't precisely comfortable, but it wasn't a torment, either. I clenched my fingers, but something was wrong with them. They barely moved. It was as though someone had replaced my bones and flesh with lead weights, heavy and inert, and my tendons and muscles were too weak to break the inertia. But I felt cool, damp earth crumbling beneath my fingertips.

“Doesn't seem to bode well,” I mumbled. My tongue didn't work right. My lips didn't, either. The words came out a slushy mumble.

“Excellent,” rasped the voice. “I told you he had strength enough.”

My thoughts resonated abruptly with another voice, one that had no point of contact with my ears:
WE WILL SEE.

What had my godmother said at my grave? That it was all about respect and . . .

. . . and proxies.

“The eyes,” rasped the voice. “Open your eyes, mortal.”

My eyelids were in the same condition as everything else. They didn't want to move. But I made them. I realized that they felt cooler than the rest of my skin, as if someone had recently wiped them with a damp washcloth.

I opened them and cried out weakly at the intensity of the light.

I waited for a moment, then tried again. Then again. On the four or five hundredth try, I was finally able to see.

I was in a cave, lit by wan, onion-colored light. I could see a roof of rock and earth, with roots of trees as thick as my waist trailing through here and there. Water dripped down from overhead, all around me. I could hear it. Some dropped onto my lips, and I licked at it. It tasted sweet, sweeter than double-thick cherry syrup, and I shivered in pleasure this time.

I was
starving
.

I looked around me slowly. It made my head feel like it was about to fly apart every time I twitched it, but I persevered. I was, so far as I could tell, naked. I was lying on fine, soft earth that had somehow been contoured to the shape of my body. There were pine needles—soft ones—spread about beneath me in lieu of a blanket, their scent sharp and fresh.

There was a dull throb coming from my arms, and I looked down to see . . .

There were . . . roots or vines or something, growing
into
me. They wrapped around my wrists and penetrated the skin there, structures that were plantlike but pale and spongy-looking. I could barely make out some kind of fluid flowing through the tendrils and presumably into my body. I wanted to scream and thrash my arms, but it just seemed like too much work. A moment later, my leaden thoughts notified me that the vines looked something like . . . an intravenous fluid line. An IV.

What the hell kind of Hell was this supposed to be?

I realized that something rounded and unyielding was supporting my head. I twitched and moved myself enough to look up, and realized that my head was being held in someone's lap.

“Ah,” whispered the voice. “Now you begin to understand.”

I looked up still farther . . . and found myself staring into the face of Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, the veritable mother of wicked faeries herself.

Mab looked . . . not cadaverous. It wasn't a word that applied. Her skin seemed stretched tight over her bones, her face distorted to inhuman proportions. Her emerald green eyes were inhumanly huge in that sunken face, her teeth unnaturally sharp. She brushed a hand over one of my cheeks, and her fingers looked too long, her nails grown out like claws. Her arms looked like nothing but bone and sinew with skin stretched over them, and her elbows were somehow too large, too swollen, to look even remotely human. Mab didn't look like a cadaver. She looked like some kind of nearly starved insect, a praying mantis smiling down at its first meal in weeks.

“Oh,” I said, and if my speech was halting, at least it sounded almost human. “That kind of Hell.”

Mab tilted back her head and cackled. It was a dull, brittle sound, like the edge of a rusted knife. “No,” she said. “Alas, no, my knight. No, you have not escaped. I have far too much work for your hand to allow that. Not yet.”

I stared at her dully, which was probably the only way I was capable of staring at the moment. Then I croaked, “I'm . . . alive?”

Her smile widened even more. “And
well
, my dear knight.”

I grunted. It was all the enthusiasm I could summon. “Yay?”

“It makes me feel like singing,” Mab's voice grated from between sharp teeth. “Welcome back, O my knight, to the green lands of the living.”

ENOUGH,
said that enormous thought-voice, the same one from the graveyard, but less mind annihilating.
THE FOOLISH GAMBLE IS CONCLUDED. HIS PHYSICAL NEEDS MUST BE MET.

“I know what I am doing,” Mab purred. Or it would have been a purr, if cats had been made from steel wool. “Fear not, ancient thing. Your custodian lives.”

I turned my head slowly the other way. After a subjective century, I was able to see the other figure in the cave.

It was enormous, a being that had to crouch not to bump its head on the ceiling. It was, more or less, human in form—but I could see little of that form. It was almost entirely concealed in a vast cloak of dark green, with shadows hiding whatever lay beneath it. The cloak's hood covered its head, but I could see tiny green fires, like small, flickering clouds of fireflies, burning within the hood's shadowed depth.

Demonreach. The genius loci of the intensely weird, unmapped island in the middle of Lake Michigan. We'd . . . sort of had an arrangement, made a couple of years back. And I was beginning to think that maybe I hadn't fully understood the extent of that arrangement.

“I'm . . . on the island?” I rasped.

“Long have this old thing and I labored to keep your form alive, my knight,” Mab said. “Long have we kept flesh and bone and blood knit together and stirring, waiting for your spirit's return.”

Parasite? What?

I'd already had a really, really long day.

“But . . . I got shot,” I mumbled.

“
My
knight,” Mab hissed, the statement one of possession. “Your broken body fell from your ship into cold and darkness—and they are
my
domain.”

THE COLD QUEEN BROUGHT YOU TO HERE,
Demonreach emitted. My head was starting to ache, hearing his psychic voice.
YOUR PHSYICAL VESSEL WAS PRESERVED
.

“And now here you are,” Mab murmured. “Oh, the Quiet One angered us, sending your essence out unprotected. Had he been incorrect, I would have been robbed of my knight, and the old monster of his custodian.”

I blinked slowly, and again my lagging brain started catching up to me.

Mab had me.

I hadn't escaped her. I hadn't escaped what she could make me become.

Oh, God.

And all the people who'd gotten hurt, helping me . . . They'd done it for
nothing
.

“Told me . . . I was dead,” I muttered.

“
Dead
is a grey word,” Mab hissed. “Mortals fear it, and so they wish it to be black—and they have but few words to contain its reality. It escapes from such constraints. Death is a spectrum, not a line. And you, my knight, had not yet vanished into the utter darkness.”

I licked at my lips again. “Guess . . . you're kind of upset with me. . . .”

“You attempted to
cheat
the Queen of Air and Darkness,” Mab hissed. “You practiced a vile, wicked deception upon me, my knight.” Her inhuman eyes glittered. “I expected no less of you. Were you not strong enough to cast such defiance into my teeth, you would be useless to my purposes.” Her smile widened. “To
our
purposes now.”

The very ground seemed to quiver, to let out an unthinkably low, deep, angry growl.

Mab's eyes snapped to Demonreach. “I have his oath, ancient one. What he has given is mine by right, and you may not gainsay it. He is mine to shape as I please.”

“Dammit,” I said tiredly. “Dammit.”

And a voice—a very calm, very gentle, very rational voice whispered in my ear, “Lies. Mab cannot change who you are.”

I struggled and twitched my fingers. “Five,” I muttered, “Six. Seven. Heh.” I couldn't help it. I laughed again. It hurt like hell and it felt wonderful. “Heh. Heh.”

Mab had gone very still. She stared at me with wide eyes, her alien face void of expression.

“No,” I said then, weakly. “No. Maybe I'm your knight. But I'm not yours.”

Emerald fire flickered in her eyes, cold and angry. “What?”

“You can't make me your monster,” I slurred. “Doesn't work. And you know it.”

Mab's eyes grew colder, more distant. “Oh?”

“You can make me do things,” I said. “You can mess with my head. But all that makes me is a thug.” The effort of so many words cost me. I had to take a moment to rest before I continued. “You wanted a thug; you get that from anywhere. Lloyd Slate was a thug. Plenty where he came from.”

Demonreach's burning eyes flickered, and a sense of something like cold satisfaction came from the cloaked giant.

“Said it yourself: need someone like me.” I met Mab's eyes with mine and curled my upper lip into a sneer. “Go on. Try to change me. The second you do, the second I think you've played with my head or altered my memory, the first time you compel me to do something, I'll do the one thing you can't have in your new knight.” I lifted my head a little, and I knew that I must have looked a little crazy as I spoke. “I'll
do
it. I'll follow your command. And I will do
nothing
else. I'll make every task you command one you must personally oversee. I'll have the initiative of a garden statue. And do you know what that will give you, my queen?”

Her eyes burned. “What?”

I felt my own smile widen. “A mediocre knight,” I said. “And mediocrity, my queen, is a terrible, terrible fate.”

Her voice came forth from lips so cold that frost began forming on them. The next drop of water to fall on me thumped gently, a tiny piece of sleet. “Do you think I cannot punish you for such defiance? Do you think I cannot visit such horrors upon those you love as to create legends that last a thousand years?”

I didn't flinch. “I think you've got too much on your plate already,” I spat back. “I think you don't have the time or the energy to spare to fight your own knight anymore. I think you need me, or you wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of keeping me alive for this long, of taxing your strength this much to get it done. You need me. Or else why are you here? In Chicago? In May?”

Again, the inhuman eyes raked at mine. But when she spoke, her voice was very, very soft and far more terrible than a moment before. “I am not some mortal merchant to be bargained with. I am not some petty president to be argued with. I am Mab.”

“You are Mab,” I said. “And I owe you a debt for preserving my life. For giving me the power I needed to save my daughter's life. Don't think that I have forgotten that.”

The faerie's expression finally changed. She frowned and tilted her head slightly, as if puzzled. “Then why this defiance? When you know I will take vengeance for it?”

“Because my soul is my own,” I said quietly. “You cannot steal it from me. You cannot change it. You cannot buy it. I am mine, Mab. I have fought long and hard against horrors even you would respect. I have been beaten, but I have not yielded. I'm not going to start yielding now. If I did, I wouldn't be the weapon you need.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I will be the Winter Knight,” I told her. “I will be the most terrifying Knight the Sidhe Courts have ever known. I will send your enemies down in defeat and make your power grow.” I smiled again. “But I do it my way. On my terms. When you give me the task, I'll decide how it gets done—and you'll stay out of the way and let me work. And that's how it's going to be.”

After a long silent moment, she said, “You dare give commands to
me
, mortal?”

“I can't control you,” I said. “I know that. But I can control me. And I've just told you the only way you get what you want out of me.” I shrugged a little. “Up to you, my queen. But think about whether you want another thug to command or an ally to respect. Otherwise, you might as well start cutting on me right here, right now, and get yourself somebody with less backbone.”

The Queen of Air and Darkness stared down at me for silent moments. Then she said, “You will never be my ally. Not in your heart.”

“Probably not,” I said. “But I can follow the example of my godmother. I can be a trusted enemy. I can work with you.”

Mab's pale white eyebrows lifted and her eyes gleamed. “I will never trust you, wizard.” And then she rose abruptly and let my head fall back to the earth. She walked away, her silken gown hanging limply upon her insect-thin frame. “Prepare yourself.”

Demonreach stirred. The pale tendrils and roots began withdrawing themselves from my arms, leaving small, bleeding holes behind.

“For what?” I asked.

“For the journey to my court, Sir Knight.” She paused and looked over one shoulder at me, green eyes bright and cold. “There is much work to do be done.”