Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (10 page)

Vai inhaled sharply.

Desperately, I tried to open the door, but the numbness in my lips had infested my
whole body. All I could do was watch through gremlin eyes.

The creature who looked like me leaned closer to Vai. The neck of her blouse gapped
open to reveal no bodice beneath, nothing but bare skin. Vai pressed back against
the seat.

Her hands wandered up the front of his dash jacket.

“Sire a child on me,” the creature said in a voice like mine but nothing like mine,
because its whisper was cruelly seductive, “and I’ll leave any children you sire on
her alone.”

Vai spoke in a hoarse murmur. “You can’t bear children. You’re a man.”

“Do I feel like a man?”

Her lips brushed his. Her knee eased between his thighs and her hands spanned his
shoulders to draw him into her kiss. Breasts brushed his chest. Vai became as rigid
as if he had turned to ice. I guessed he was angry at himself for being aroused.

I could scarcely blame him. If I hadn’t known I was me, I would have thought I was
her.

If I’d had a body and an axe, I would have smashed in my sire’s head.

“No,” Vai said against its lips, his mouth unyielding.

“But you want me,” the Master of the Wild Hunt said in my voice, like a purr of desire.

Her voice, her hands on him, were claws digging into my flesh, yet I could do nothing.

“No.” Vai’s voice was clear and cold. “I want
her
. There is a difference.”

“What difference would that be?”

“The shape you wear is an illusion.”

“When she comes for you, as you and I both know she is trying to do right now, how
will you know if it is she or I who grasps you close and whispers words of hope and
love?”

Vai relaxed. My sire did not know the secrets of the djeliw and bards, with their
wholly human magic. He did not know about the way our marriage had bound us. He did
not know I wore a locket.

“I admit I can tell no difference between you and her,” Vai said, a cunning statement
that had the advantage of being truth because words can have two meanings. “But right
now I know you are not her. I will not do this.”

My sire sat back into the other seat, melting back into his young male form, a finger
tapping his lips as he considered his captive.

Vai ran a hand down the buttons of his dash jacket, straightening and smoothing, an
action that apparently calmed him. I had not been so steadfast in withholding my kiss
from the opia.

As this uncomfortable thought chased me, I heard the rumble of wind. The coach rocked
and swayed as if caught in the tidal currents of the spirit world. As I clung, barely
hanging on, I suddenly remembered why the Master of the Wild Hunt used this coach.
In the spirit world, the tides of dragons’ dreams altered the landscape and any creatures
caught out in it. But the coachman had been made in the mortal world by the cunning
artifice of goblins. He, and the coach and four horses that were a part of him, could
not be changed. To travel in the coach was to be safe from the altering tidal waves.

“What do you really want?” Vai asked.

“I want what I am required to want. I do the bidding of my masters, just as you no
doubt do the bidding of yours.”

“The servants of the night court answer questions with questions, and you do not.
I would like to know who or what the Master of the Wild Hunt calls master.”

“Do not doubt my intentions. If she cannot rescue you, you will be the next sacrifice.”

“Not until the next Hallows’ Night,” said Vai in the clipped tone he used when he
was particularly wound up. “So I ask again, if you intend to kill me, what chance
is there I would ever agree to sire a child on you if it would gain me nothing? If
you do kill me, how can I sire a child on your daughter, if a child born to your daughter
is what
you require? Neither of these things can be accomplished unless you free me, allow
me to return to her, and promise me you’ll never hunt me down.”

“A well-argued point. Why would I need you at all? I could sire a child on her myself.”

The words hit like a punch in the chest. Fingers slipping, I almost lost my grip on
the latch.

So fast I didn’t see it coming, Vai swung up his sword and stabbed my sire.

He aimed for up under the ribs to the heart, a move he’d no doubt been taught by rote
by the mage House’s swordmaster. But the close confines of the coach and my sire’s
astonishingly fast reflexes—an arm flung up—deflected the blow. The tip slid into
the meat of my sire’s right shoulder.

Pain pierced like steel sliding into my own flesh.

I screamed. A howl rose, shuddering around me and through me: Every creature bound
to the Master of the Wild Hunt by blood felt the cut of that blade.

My sire grabbed the blade with his left hand. A clear ichor oozed from his shoulder.
The translucent liquid dribbled down the length of the blade. The fingers of my left
hand flamed with agony. I was barely holding on with my right, hanging over the abyss.

My sire did not let go of the sword. He raised his right hand to squeeze Vai’s sword
arm. Eyes flared with fury, he spoke in a terrifying whisper. “What is done to me,
I do to her. That was her cry of agony.”

Vai froze, struck between horror and disbelief. With a single tug, my sire pulled
the sword out of his shoulder and shoved the blade against Vai’s throat.

I choked out a wordless cry. The screams and whimpers of the pack echoed me, their
pain and my pain churning like so many merging currents until I was almost obliterated.
Vai’s hand spasmed on the hilt of the sword as he fought uselessly against the paralysis
washing through him.

“It would have gone better for you if you’d stayed amusing. I’d have sheltered you
then, at least until next Hallows’ Night. Now you’ve made me angry. I’m throwing you
into the pit. No mortal can survive there.”

I struggled to open the latch, but my limbs had no strength. I was as frozen as I
had been in my dream. Frost crackled out from the ichor that seeped from my sire’s
wounded shoulder, like winter devouring the dying memory of summer. Its lacework beauty
ate through the human form my sire had taken. Ice engulfed the interior of the coach,
consuming every morsel of space that was not the coach itself. Ice entombed Vai, so
cloudy and dense I could see only the line of steel that marked his sword.

Last of all, ice crystals bristled down the length of the latch. With a whimper of
fear the outside latch gremlin shut its eyes, leaving me alone in the dark.

Yet instead of falling, I held on. Nothing, not even my sire’s vile threat, could
make me give up. The rocking ceased, and I found myself back on the tree as abruptly
as if I had never left it. Clutching the nub of a broken branch, I heaved myself up,
gritting past the blaze of pain in my right shoulder and left hand. The pain told
me that what I had witnessed was real, not a dream.

As I climbed, the air changed texture, stirred by a guava-scented wind. I emerged
into the hollow trunk of a ceiba tree so huge that the buttressing of its aboveground
roots rose like the pillars of a house over my head. The chittering of Rory’s captors
echoed around me, but I could not see them. I sought threads of shadow to conceal
myself, but here in the spirit world the shadows were like eels, too slippery to hold.
Skulking in the tangle of roots, furious and almost weeping at losing Vai when I had
come so close to him, I probed at my shoulder. Just below the collarbone rose a puckered
scar, tender to the touch. The fingers of my left hand were scored with whitened scars,
cleanly healed. The ache subsided to that of an injury sustained days ago instead
of moments. The speed of healing was a brutal reminder of how time passed differently
in the spirit world, where an hour might equate to days in the mortal world and a
day to months. How much time had passed in the mortal world just while I climbed the
tree? How far away was Vai now?

Hidden within the roots, I peered onto open ground, my first glimpse of the spirit
world here in Taino country. In the heavens, no sun or moon shone. The sky had a silvery-white
sheen like the inside of a conch shell. Straight ahead lay a monumental ballcourt
where figures
played batey, the game so beloved in Expedition and throughout the Antilles. The players
ran up and down the ballcourt bouncing a rubber ball off thighs or forearms or elbows,
never letting it touch the ground. They even bounced the ball off stone belts they
wore around their hips, although in Expedition no one used the traditional gear.

At the end of the ballcourt closest to me rose a stone platform. A man sat there,
cross-legged, watching the game. He wore a headdress ridged with feathers as in imitation
of a troll’s bright crest, a white cotton loin wrap, and armlets of beaten gold. His
septum was pierced by a needle of pale green jade, and he wore dangling earrings carved
out of bone. One step below him, a rabbit dressed in a loin wrap was seated at a sloped
writing desk with a brush in hand, busily writing in sweeping strokes as its ears
twitched.

I crossed the plaza, climbed four steps, and halted below the lord.

“You’re the Thunder, the Herald of the storm the people call hurricane.”

“Here you are, Cousin,” said the Thunder, unsurprised by my arrival. “By what name
should I call you?”

“People call me Cat,” I replied, for I knew better than to reveal my full name. “Why
did you take my brother?”

“You took a life. We took a life.”

Dread chilled my heart. “Have you killed my brother?”

“Death is merely the other side of the island.”

“I haven’t the knowledge to debate questions of natural philosophy with you. I just
want my brother back.”

“It is time for the match. Batey is the game.” He gestured toward the ballcourt. At
the motion of his hand, thunder grumbled beneath my feet. “If you score, then we shall
give you a chance to stand before the elders and defend yourself against the accusation
laid against you. On behalf of the spirit lord you call the Master of the Wild Hunt,
you cut a path into our country and allowed him to kill here as if he possessed the
right to do so when he possesses no such right. Think how we must look at you, Cousin!
We let you walk in our land as a guest, and you betrayed us.”

My head was still spinning with the vision of Vai encased in ice. “So if I score a
point, I’ll be allowed to stand trial before a hostile assembly? That’s my chance?”

“If you don’t choose to speak in your own defense, it’s no skin off my nose.”

“It scarcely seems a sporting game if I’m obliged to play a game I only learned a
few months ago against spirits and opia who have played for time uncounted.”

“I freely offer you a gift, Cousin.” A skull inset with beads and gems sat by his
right knee, and I was sure it was watching me, for its hollow eyes gleamed. “The gift
of the skill you would have achieved had you played the game for as long as these
others have.”

I had to take the chances I was offered. “That seems fair. I agree only if all responsibility
falls to me. If the ancestors find I am not at fault, then my brother and I are both
free to go.”

“We are agreed.”

“I’ll need leather cords to tie up my skirt.”

The rabbit scribe set down its pen and tossed me a rope of braided cords. I untangled
the cords and used them to secure my skirt at knee length. I still wore only my sleeveless
bodice.

Thunder himself fitted me with arm guards. There was something not intrusive but intimate
in the way he handled my body. He did not loom or leer, but I felt the spark all the
same. Loving Vai had opened my eyes to the currents that roil the waters between people
who feel attraction one for the other. But while I might have been appreciative, I
was not tempted. I smiled to show I understood his game, and I stepped back politely.

He looked me up and down suggestively. “Do you play with the sword attached? Like
a man? It will only get in your way.”

“I will not give the sword into anyone’s hand except my brother’s.” Although I looked
around the central area, I could not see Rory. “If you bring him to me and let him
watch, then I will let him hold it for me.”

“You do not ask what will happen if you do not score a point.”

“I see no need to ask,” I said.

He laughed. A second laugh echoed him in a mist of rain. At the other end of the ballcourt
rose another platform. There another man sat cross-legged. He had skin the color of
waves and hair like long brown seaweed: It was Thunder’s brother, Flood, he who had
almost drowned me when I had been trapped beneath an overturned boat.

Vai had saved me from the flood.

Resolve steeled my heart. I would not let them intimidate me. “There’s no reason for
me to play if I don’t know my brother is safe.”

“I agree,” said Thunder with a suspiciously amused smile. I scarcely had time to blink
before a bedraggled saber-toothed cat appeared under the ceiba tree’s lofty roots.
With amber eyes fixed on me, he limped the long painful way to the platform. When
he arrived, I examined his shoulder. Like my injuries, the wounds were healing unnaturally
fast. I pressed a cheek into the coarse black fur of his head, stroking behind his
ears.

“I give my sword into your care until I come back for it. Wait for my signal. We may
have to retreat quickly.”

I lashed the sword to his body, took a swig of the potent ginger beer, and rubbed
my nose against his dry one. At last, I descended onto the ballcourt.

The stone risers, where onlookers sat, swarmed with people and spirits and creatures,
some wearing the same form and others shifting through faces as if they had no face
of their own. The force of all those gazes made me tremendously uncomfortable, for
I preferred the shadows. The players had gathered along the walls of the ballcourt.
Most looked as human as I did, but some had the heads of animals or had claws or paws
or furled wings. The crowd roared as I looked around to see who would play with me,
for alone I could not possibly score. Maybe this was the trick by which Thunder meant
to defeat me.