Lost Ones-Veil 3 (16 page)

One of the Battle Swine lifted its axe and started for her. Damia shifted, held her sword across her body, and shot a kick at the nearest boar. As she did, she extended her sword in the other direction, stabbing through the hand of the attacking swine. It squealed and dropped its axe.

Her heart raced. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck and trickled between her breasts as she steadied her breathing. The trio of Swine glared at her with their little piggy eyes, and she knew they saw her as a threat for the first time. They would not play with her, now. They would just kill her.

Damia smiled. She would not make it easy for them.

Both hands on the grip of her sword, she glanced back and forth between two of the Swine, keeping track of the third in her peripheral vision. A single second stretched into eternity, and she felt them move even before they began to attack.

Then a massive gust of wind blew down on top of them, staggering Damia and pushing the three Swine back a single step. A shadow blocked out the sunlight that streamed through the branches, and then a body struck the ground, driven down by the supernatural wind. Bones cracked. Green feathers danced on the breeze. Antlers snapped.

The Peryton that had scouted for the Yucatazcan battalion lay dead, separating Damia from two of the Battle Swine. The Atlantean Hunter’s green wings were folded beneath it. Arrows had been shot through its chest and neck, but it had been the strength of the wind that had slammed it to the earth and killed it. Dark ichor leaked from the broken Peryton in a spreading pool.

A low grunt and a scuffle came from behind her, and Damia spun to face the third Battle Swine only to find it already dead. Gaka, the Japanese oni who served in her Borderkind platoon, had come up behind it. The ox-headed oni held the head of the Swine by its matted hair. Gaka had twisted the beast’s head right off.

Damia nodded to him. Gaka blinked all three of his eyes as he nodded in return. The commander glanced around to see the remains of her Borderkind platoon closing in. Four ogres had survived, though one had grievous wounds on his side and face and a broken arm. Two Naga archers slithered across the ground, bowstrings drawn back, arrows aimed at the remaining two Battle Swine.

The wind spiraled down and took human form as Howlaa, an impossibly tall, impossibly thin, blond female, clad in white fur. The elemental wind spirit came from the Northlands, like the ogres and the Battle Swine. Howlaa spat at the Swine. One of the ogres, huge war hammer in one hand, cuffed a Swine with the other. They felt betrayed by these other legends from their homelands.

Damia waved off the Nagas. The archers lowered their bows.

The Battle Swine grunted and one of them laughed. Neither had dropped its axe.

“Take them,” the commander said.

She turned her back, having been witness to more than enough death for one day. As she did, Old Roger stepped from a tangle of underbrush. His flesh seemed more like knotted wood than she remembered and his ruddy cheeks were red as apples. She wondered how effective he had been in battle, but that was before she looked past him and saw the three Yucatazcan soldiers who had been impaled from the ground up, with branches growing out of their sides and faces. Apple blossoms tipped each branch.

“All over but the tears, eh, Commander?” Old Roger asked.

Damia glanced around. Her soldiers had begun to come together in small clusters. Some were tending to wounded, others gathering the weapons of their fallen enemies. Goblins scampered up into trees. Pixies darted off and disappeared, normally unwilling to be seen by the Lost Ones. All sorts of other Oldwood creatures had aided them in this battle, but most of them had hidden themselves away again.

“So it appears,” Damia replied.

A cavalryman cantered through the trees toward her.

“Report,” she said.

The soldier bowed his head. “From what we can tell, Commander, none of the invaders who entered the Oldwood made it out of the forest alive.”

“Excellent.” Damia glanced at the wind spirit. “Howlaa, take a look. Do not allow yourself to be seen. If there are others to the west of the Oldwood, we’ll wait until dark and attack. If they march north to try to go around, we’ll pursue them and still have the element of surprise.”

Old Roger made a small noise.

“What is it?” Damia asked.

“You don’t think either of those things is going to happen.”

“True. I believe they will retreat southward and wait for reinforcements before making any further attempt to reach Perinthia. There are too many unknowns for them here, and they have just learned their forces aren’t sufficient to overcome them.”

Howlaa smiled, and the wind whipped around her, sweeping her up into invisible nothingness. The trees rustled and she was gone, off to observe the enemy’s movements.

“Their forces aren’t sufficient,” a shrill, grating voice said, “but they will be soon.”

Damia glanced around and saw the swift-footed Charlie Grant leaning against a tree as though he had been there for hours. Behind him, Cernunnos, lord of the forest, stepped out from the daylight shadows, his antlers crusted with dripping gore. Damia held her breath. Apparently the lord of the forest had engaged in battle himself.

But it had been the boyish Charlie who had spoken.

“You can talk?” Damia said, studying him.

The little man took out his whistle and gave it a toot. “I like the sound of this and despise the screech of my own voice. Once I had a beautiful voice. You should have heard me sing. Women swooned. Men laid down their weapons. Then I bedded the daughter of a witch, and the hag punished me thusly.”

Damia understood. His voice made her skin crawl. The whistle was vastly preferable.

“If you have news, Master Grant, you’d best announce it,” Damia instructed.

Charlie nodded grimly. “Dire news, but not unexpected, Commander. The alliance has been struck between Atlantis and Yucatazca. Of course, the High Council presents it as though they are only now coming to the aid of Prince Tzajin against Hunyadi, blaming Hunyadi again for the murder of King Mahacuhta.”

Frustrated, Damia sheathed her sword with a sharp click. “Do the people of either kingdom believe that? How could anyone?”

“Some will,” Charlie replied. “Many in Yucatazca, of course, but far more in Atlantis. And the governments of Nubia and other lands are not going to get involved if they can at least pretend the war is just. The invasion force has been driven back in many places, but a single, massive battle front has formed thirty miles north of the Isthmus.”

Her infantry and cavalry had begun to gather around her. Damia forced herself to put on an air of confidence she did not feel.

“Then we have not a moment to lose. Hopefully more troops will come from the north and east. Until then, we must do all that we can.”

She studied Cernunnos. He shifted, muscles rippling under his pelt. There was grace and majesty in the lord of the forest, but grim disdain as well.

“What of you, milord? Will you and the wild of Oldwood help us to defend Euphrasia?”

Cernunnos scraped the ground with one hoof. “I have told you that we will not leave here. If the invaders pass through, we will stop them. But the Oldwood will not fight Hunyadi’s wars for him.”

“Even though your help could mean the difference between victory and defeat? If we fall, you will have no allies to defend your own land.”

Many of the wild things in Oldwood had emerged once more to hear her speak. Goblins and owls watched her closely. A hideous hag-woman with blue skin stood only a few feet from Cernunnos, shaking her head as though angry at the idea of any further alliance.

“We will survive,” Cernunnos said.

“Yes. Until they come and burn down the whole wood.” Damia sighed. “Whatever you wish, milord. I only hope we’re able to defeat the invasion without your help. Otherwise, by the time the war comes to you for the last time, you’ll be on your own.”

The lord of the forest studied her a moment from beneath the rank of antlers that sat heavy upon his head like a crown.

“You will want to bury your dead, I presume?”

Commander Beck nodded. “Yes. If it’s no trouble, and their remains won’t be disturbed.”

“They will be left at peace,” Cernunnos replied. “They died with courage and as our friends. But leave the corpses of the invaders to the animals. The forest has to eat.”

CHAPTER
11

D
awn had broken over Ecuador. Light rain fell, and Collette Bascombe lay her head back and let it sprinkle her face. Hidden away in the thick of a banana plantation, clad in the stale clothes she had worn for months in the dungeon, she would have given almost anything for a shower and clean clothes. And perhaps she would get them, soon. For the moment, though, she was just grateful to be back in her own world.

Your world? Really?

The words came unbidden into her mind and the voice of her conscience had an edge. She and Oliver were children of two worlds, the living embodiment of everything the Veil was not. They were human and legend together. But this ordinary world was hers. And still felt like home.

The rain fell. The wind blew. People worked and played, lived and died, and it was all completely ordinary. Little people weren’t likely to come out of the jungle. Monkeys weren’t prone to transforming into men and speaking riddles or holding grudges.

The legend said that a child of human and Borderkind—someone like her, or Oliver—was destined to tear down the Veil between the ordinary and legendary worlds. At the moment, Collette thought this was a spectacularly bad idea. She liked her world just the way it was. Boring. Ordinary. Life had enough peril and ugliness without adding all of the problems of the legendary world to it.

She wished she could stay here. Not hiding among the banana trees—although even that would be preferable—but here in the mundane world. Even a few days’ reprieve would have filled her heart with joy. But there would be no rest. No break at all. Her brother and Julianna were still there, on the other side of the Veil. Julianna would be there forever, it seemed, trapped by the magic that had created the godforsaken barrier between worlds.

Oliver and Julianna were caught in a war zone, and Collette was going back, not just for them, but because—no matter how nice it felt to be in her own world—they all had a score to settle. In life, there were some fights you could never walk away from. Not and forgive yourself.

Yet for the moment, Collette tried to let the peace and quiet of the plantation soothe her. The rain fell warm and gentle. The breeze smelled delicious and earthy. She and Frost had learned they were in Ecuador as soon as they had reached the outskirts of the city. A garbage can by the side of the road had given up a dirty, torn newspaper. They were in Machado, and just a few miles away was Puerto Bolivar, its sister city.

In the night, they had stolen along the perimeter of the city and eventually found the banana plantation.

Collette didn’t want to spend a minute longer than she had to with Frost. The winter man said little. His blue-white eyes issued a kind of cold mist and his expression was grim; a crack in the ice made up his mouth. At the moment, she enjoyed his absence.

Then the light rain turned to brittle, frozen sleet, and she swore under her breath and sat up. The banana trees rustled and a gust of wind blew snow and ice across the sky. Impossibly fast, the small blizzard built itself into a man.

“Time to go,” Frost said.

He glanced around, as though afraid they might be discovered. His hair—like dreadlocks made of ice—clinked together when he moved.

Collette climbed to her feet, feeling tiny beside the winter man. She had never been tall. With the spray of freckles across her nose and her petite stature, she had often had to fight extra hard for people to see her as something more than just “the cute girl.” Now, all of that life was in her past. Her job, her friends in New York, all done with. She tried not to think about whether she would ever be able to go back.

“You found an American Express office?”

Frost narrowed his eyes, ice cracking. “No. We haven’t time for that.”

“That’s the only way out of here,” Collette said. “I need identification. I need money. And you said it’s too dangerous to try to cross back through the Veil so close to Palenque.”

“All true. So come with me.”

The winter man turned and started along a path between two rows of banana trees. The top of the main plantation building could be seen in the other direction. Collette stared at his back a moment, then hurried to catch up.

“Look, it’s going to take weeks—”

“We don’t have weeks!” Frost said, spinning on her. The air around Collette dropped thirty or forty degrees. Her breath fogged and her eyelashes stuck together when she blinked.

“Listen—”

“No. Collette, stop. You haven’t been thinking properly since we crossed the Veil. Perhaps it’s because you’re back in your world and you think, suddenly, that means that you need to follow the rules of humanity. But you can’t think that way. Authorities all across your world will be looking for you, now. You vanished, remember? After your father was murdered.”

“So, now I’m a suspect, the way Oliver was?”

The look on Frost’s face chilled her.

“Perhaps. That does not matter at all. Regardless, you will be questioned. They will want to know where you have been. All of that will take time, during which Oliver and Julianna—and many thousands of others, both of your kind and mine—may lose their lives.”

Collette shivered, then shook it off and faced him. She’d been tormented by the Sandman, kept as his captive, and escaped only to fall into the hands of Ty’Lis and end up in the dungeon at Palenque. In that time, she had learned a great deal about herself. She had found the magic of her mother’s heritage inside her and a strength that came from her own heart. Home had a powerful allure, but the time hadn’t come yet to indulge that.

Still, she studied Frost closely and did not care that he took offense at her scrutiny.

“You doubt me,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Our goals are the same, Collette. They always have been.”

“Including when you brought Oliver across the Veil and left me to be murdered by the Myth Hunters?”

Frost cocked his head. “They did not kill you.”

“True. The Sandman took me. There were times I would rather have died. Just because Oliver and I are both still alive doesn’t mean you did the right thing,” Collette snapped.

“This is foolishness,” Frost said. He started walking again, but something wavered in his tone and aspect that said he might not be as confident as she had always thought. Collette didn’t know whether to be heartened or frightened.

“Frost—”

“It might not have been the right choice, but it was the only choice. It kept you both alive. Oliver and I owed our lives to each other, several times over.”

Collette caught up to him again. “And through all of that, you never trusted him enough to tell him the truth?”

Frost kept walking. “He was safer not knowing.”

“But he deserved to know.
We
deserved to know.”

“And now he hates me,” Frost said.

Collette paused. Frost went on several steps under the banana trees, soft rain pattering against his slick, icy form. Then he stopped, but did not turn. Collette had heard the weary sadness in his voice. Maybe all he’d said was true. Perhaps he had thought of Oliver as his friend, and the rift between them pained him.

“No,” she said, softly. “I’m the one who hates you. I’m the one you left behind. Oliver only resents you. Maybe he’ll forgive you, one of these days.”

Slowly, the winter man turned. For the first time, his face—all sharp lines and edges—looked almost human.

“And you?” Frost asked.

Collette shook her head. “You and I were never friends.”

After a moment, the winter man nodded. “Fair enough.”

He turned and strode more quickly along the path. In silence, Collette followed. A little over a minute later and they had reached a fence that ran around the perimeter of the plantation. Frost reached out and froze a section of the fence, then, with a fist, he shattered it.

On the other side they came to a dirt road. Nothing moved along that road—neither person nor vehicle—but twenty yards to the left a small gray truck sat on the shoulder. Rust had eaten away part of the front end and the sides of the truck were spattered with dried mud.

Frost started toward it.

“What the hell is this?” Collette said, hurrying to get a better look at the truck. Anxious, she glanced up and down the road, but they were completely alone. Frost moved with purpose, and that worried her.

“What’ve you done?” she asked.

At the truck, the winter man paused and glanced back at her. Mist rose from his eyes, drifting on the breeze. The rain around him turned to sleet and pelted the truck with a metallic prickling.

“I’ve become a thief,” Frost said. Perhaps he smiled as he said it. “But not a murderer, if that is your concern.”

With a gesture, he indicated the roadside. Under the trees lay a brown shape, and it took her a moment to recognize it as some kind of canvas tarp. Beneath it, she realized, lay the driver of this truck.

“He’s not dead?”

“He’ll live,” Frost replied. “Get in the truck and drive, please.”

“Where are we going?”

The winter man opened the passenger door, climbed in, and closed it, just as if there were nothing strange at all about a creature made entirely of ice and snow riding in a rusty old truck.

Collette did as he asked. The keys were in the ignition and the truck started instantly. The windows were open. Several times Frost simply evaporated out of his seat, drifting up into the sky, a twisting storm cloud rushing ahead of the truck, only to pour himself back into the seat a minute or two later with directions. They stayed north of the city, though Collette got several glimpses of it through her window; she was surprised at how modern it seemed. The truck rattled along plantation roads and then what might have passed for a main road. For a mile or so it seemed they might actually drive into Machala, and then Frost directed her to take a narrow, rutted turn to the northwest.

Moments later, they came in sight of the water. To the south, she could see the port and was stunned to find not only fishing boats but elegant pleasure craft and huge shipping vessels. They bounced through a pothole and she had to focus on the road, but she could still glimpse the port in the rearview mirror. On the left, they rolled past a massive seaside operation that a sign identified as a shrimp farm.

“You really think this is going to work?” she asked.

“What?” the winter man said.

“We’re just going to take a boat? Obviously that’s your plan, because there’s no way anyone is going to let me on a plane with no identification, even if I had the money. Which means we’re stealing a boat.”

Frost glanced at her, his hair clinking together again. “I have already stolen it. The men I stole it from had guns. The hold was full of bags of white powder I assume is cocaine.”

Trying to process this news, her mind snatched one question out of a dozen. “You know what cocaine is?”

The winter man scowled. “I have been crossing the Veil since its magic was first woven. I have seen the best and worst of humanity. One of the men is dead, shot by another and fallen into the sea. The others are incapacitated.”

“You did all of this in a couple of hours?”

Frost looked back out through the windshield. “Time is short. They were evil men.”

As though it was that simple. And, Collette realized, perhaps it was. Four or five miles up the coast, the winter man directed her into a narrow drive that led into a wooded, rocky piece of property. Whoever owned the place was wealthy by any standard. Her father had been very well off, but the house that perched on the edge of the ocean here was twice the size of the Bascombe home.

They drove up and parked right in front. Collette felt wary as they got out of the truck. The front door hung from its frame. Several windows were broken. Nothing moved except the door, which swayed loosely with the breeze. Part of her wanted to go inside and see the chaos that Frost had wrought. Instead, she hurried around the side of the house, following a path that led to a dock. Two men lay bruised and bleeding and unconscious on the beach, several feet from the dock. One of them had an arm twisted at the wrong angle, clearly broken.

Collette paused to stare at him, thinking that no matter what this man had done, they ought to call someone. If his injuries were bad enough, he could die.

“We are at war,” Frost said. His voice felt like a chilly whisper against her ear. “If our war took place here, these men would be our foes.”

She took a breath. Much as she still hated Frost for leaving her to the Sandman’s mercies—and much as she had lived her entire life by the laws and morals of her own people—she could not disagree with him.

They walked out onto the dock and boarded the boat. As a child, she had watched reruns of
Miami Vice
voraciously. Drug lords and cigarette boats. They called them something else, now, but she couldn’t think of the word. Didn’t matter. If those little, slick, swift craft were cigarette boats, this one was a cigar.

Less than an hour ago, she’d been lying beneath the banana trees and thinking how nice it was to be back in her world, where things felt more real. But now, nothing about this felt real. Or maybe it was just that Frost was right—they were at war—and in war, the old rules no longer applied.

“You never asked me if I could drive this thing,” she said as she investigated the instrument panel on the boat. She ought to go below and look at the food and water stores, but there wasn’t time even for that. If she needed something, Frost would provide. She might hate him, but she knew that he needed her, now.

He needs me, because Oliver stayed behind, and if Oliver dies…

She shuddered. Of course. Frost had done it to them again. Oliver had insisted he stay behind to protect Julianna, because she couldn’t pass through the Veil. So Collette couldn’t blame Frost for that. But the truth could not be denied. Once again, he had left one Bascombe behind to live or die, content with the knowledge that he had the other in his safekeeping.

Yet as perverse as it seemed, Collette found some comfort in this. She was Legend-Born. Frost couldn’t afford to let her die. Too much relied upon the Bascombes. The Lost Ones would follow them into war, or fight on their behalf. The Borderkind who feared Atlantis’s efforts to seal off the Veil forever would fight all the harder, knowing the Legend-Born lived.