Ysabel (26 page)

“This has happened before, then? Someone else becomes . . . ?”

“Always.”

Ned was getting a headache trying to concentrate, to remember all of this. He was going to have to tell Aunt Kim. Maybe she could make sense of it. If they got out of here. The villa was so close, but it felt
years
away. He had to keep Greg from exploding. He could feel the other man’s tension beside him.

He said, “She changes? You two don’t?”

Cadell shook his head, the antlers moving. “I am as I have always been, from the first days. And so is he, may the gods rot his heart.”

“So why? Why does she . . . ?”

Again the druid, Brys, snarled something at the bigger man, and again he was ignored.

Cadell wasn’t smiling now. “She alters so that her choice alters. You are not expected to understand. I am giving you these answers to show goodwill. I am not your enemy.”

“Goodwill?
” Greg shouted. “After what you did to her? Are you insane?”

Ned grabbed for his arm again. He could feel Greg trembling, as if he wanted to charge forward, start swinging fists. He’d get cut to pieces if he did.

“I don’t understand,” Ned said. “You’re right. Maybe I don’t need to, but believe me—and this is the truth—we have no clue where she is.”

Cadell stared at him a long moment, then he sighed, as if surrendering something—a hope?

“It was always unlikely.” He shrugged. “Very well. Your road is clear now. Leave us to our search. Keep away from this. The woman by the tower, she swore that you would.”

That was Aunt Kim. “Uh-uh. No dice. She promised,” said Ned, “
before
you took one of us.” He pointed a finger, was pleased to see his hand was steady. “You changed things, not us.” He paused, took a chance. “Would you surrender someone who mattered to you, just like that?”

“It is not the same,” Cadell said. But he’d hesitated.

“Yes it is!”’ Greg snapped. “You want someone you lost, so do we!”

Ned looked at him. So did Cadell.

“Ysabel is never lost,” the big man said. “That is the nature of this. She is in the balance. And I have someone to kill.”

“Then play all that out without Melanie,” Ned said. He gambled again. “My aunt will be coming up this road any minute. She knows the one you’re mocking again
with those horns. She’s
seen
him, remember? You want her in on this? Risk losing Ysabel because you chose the wrong woman to change and got tangled with us?”

Cadell was looking away now, up towards the trees and sky. So was the druid, Ned saw. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, mentioning Aunt Kim.

He knew what they were doing. He did the same thing himself, closed his eyes, reaching inward and then out for her. No presence, no sign of her pale, bright glow. She was screening herself, or too far away.

“I do not mock him,” Cadell said, looking at Ned again. “When I am in the woods, it . . . pleases me to honour him with the horns he wears.”

Ned shook his head, angry again, and scared. It was getting to be a bit much. He heard himself saying, “Oh, sure. Right. Do you honour a king by wearing his crown?”

And where had
that
come from?
he thought.

The druid stopped rocking. Cadell blinked. Greg was staring at Ned again. Ned realized he still had a hand on the other man’s arm. He let it drop.

“Who are you?” Cadell said. He’d asked that already.

“A friend of the woman you took,” Ned said. “And nephew of the other one. The one who matters. So you need to just reverse whatever you did to Melanie, and you’ll get us all out of your hair.”

There was another silence. “That cannot be,” the druid said.

Cadell nodded his head. “Even if I wished it. You
saw
the bull die, and the fires.” He looked at Ned a moment.
“And would it be honourable for you to reclaim your woman and have someone else be lost in her stead?”

No good reply to that, actually.

“She isn’t my woman,” Ned said lamely, feeling like a high school kid again, even as he spoke. That was what you said when guys teased you about a girl, for God’s sake.

Cadell smiled. A different sort of expression. It made you realize—again—that this man had lived a very long time.

“The roadway is clear,” he repeated, gently enough. “We will go back to the sanctuary and wait for dawn, as she commanded. As it happens, you are right . . . I don’t trust him not to tell her, and she may choose to let such things matter. I have learned, at cost, not to anticipate her. Go your way.” He paused, then added, again, “I am not your enemy.”

Ned looked at him. In the headlights, under moonlight, wearing those horns, the man looked like a god himself, with a voice to match.

A week ago, Ned had been worrying about his frog dissection in biology and a class party at Gail Ridpath’s house and the hockey playoffs.

He shivered, nodded his head. What did you say to any of this, anyhow?

“Screw you,” was what Gregory said, and added an extreme obscenity.

“I would be more careful,” Cadell said, calmly.

Greg repeated exactly what he’d just said, word for word, and strode forward—towards the druid. “We’re
not going anywhere and neither are you,” he snarled at the one called Brys. “You handling this stuff? You
handle
it, man—change her back before I break your face!”

Sometimes a suspended moment boiled over into action just a little too fast.

“Stop!” cried Cadell.

Ned saw the druid raise both hands as Greg approached, moving fast. He thought the man was warding a blow. He was wrong.

Greg’s head snapped backwards. His whole upper body lifted, as his feet kept moving—almost comically—forward for an instant. Edward Marriner’s assistant, a solid, heavy-set man, went flying backwards through the air and landed hard in the road, flat on his back in the glare of the van’s headlights.

He didn’t move. His body looked awkward, crumpled, where it lay.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Ned said.

“I
said
stop,” Cadell snapped at the druid. And added something savagely in their other tongue.

Ned’s own anger came. A force such as he couldn’t remember feeling in his life. He wheeled towards the big Celt, heard himself scream, wordlessly, with fury and fear, and without knowing what he was doing, without a clue, his right hand swung up and across,
scything
through the night air, aimed towards Cadell, a good three metres away.

There was a sizzling sound, like steak first hitting a barbeque or electricity surging. Ned cried out again. Something
leaped
from his fingers like a laser—and
sliced through the stag horns, severing them halfway up. The big man roared, in shock and pain.

Then there was silence.

Cadell, still twisted in the act of ducking, stared at Ned. A hand went to his horns. What was left of them. The sliced-off, branching part lay beside him in the road.

Ned turned to the druid. The white-robed man lifted his own hands quickly, but this time clearly in selfdefence. Ned could see fear in his face.

“Who
are
you?” the druid said.

His turn, it seemed. People were asking that a whole lot, Ned thought. It could get old fast, or be really, really scary.

“Did you kill him?” he demanded. Greg still hadn’t moved.

“He’s alive,” Cadell said. “I blocked most of it. Brys, be gone now. You disobeyed me. You heard my command.”

The druid turned to him. Speaking slowly, a watchful eye on Ned, he said, “Command me not. I have a task here, for
all
of us. This is not only the three of you.”

“Yes it is,” said Cadell flatly. “It always is. Shall I unbind you, spirit from body, right here? Do you want to try journeying back to the other side right now? From this place? I will do it, you know I can. You are here only because of me.”

Another moment of stillness, a night road between trees and fields, the moon risen. Brys said something in that other tongue, words laden with a bitterness so deep
even Ned could hear it. Then the druid gestured—towards himself this time—and disappeared.

Ned shook his head. And in just about the same moment, he felt a glow within. He hadn’t been searching for her . . . Aunt Kim was reaching for
him,
he realized, letting him know she was coming. He hadn’t known that could happen.

He hadn’t known much, in fact. His right hand was tingling, from the force, the fury, of what he’d just done.

He looked at Cadell again. The remnants of the broken-off horns were gone, he saw. The man stood, golden-haired, as he had at Entremont.

Ned felt an unexpected sorrow. A loss of something, of majesty. He swallowed. “I don’t know how I did that,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d saved Greg.”

“He’ll be all right. Didn’t deserve death so soon, though he’s a fool.”

“He isn’t,” Ned protested weakly. “We’re way over our heads. We’ve
lost
someone.”

Cadell looked at him, then lifted his head, as he had before, looking above the trees. Ned saw him register that Kim was coming. The big man shook his head.

“We all lose people. I told you truth. So did Brys, in this. She is gone. There is no such person in the world any more.”

“How are we supposed to accept that, or explain it?” Ned asked.

The Celt shrugged.
Not my problem
, the gesture seemed to say. But Ned was too worn out, too spent, to be angry again.

“Carry on with your lives,” Cadell said. Golden, magnificent, the resonant voice.

Ned remembered Phelan saying the same thing to them—him and Kate—just days ago. Cadell put a hand up and ran it through his long hair. “If you stray near to us you are going to be hurt or killed, or end up hopelessly between two worlds. You are close to that already, yourself, whoever you are.” His voice was unsettlingly gentle again.

I am not your enemy.

They heard a car below them, changing gears to climb.

“Farewell,” the big man said. He lifted one hand, straight over his head.

An owl was in the air where a man had been. It was flying away, north again, over hedge, field, towards the ridge beyond the houses set back from the road, then it was gone.

Ned looked at his hands. He felt like one of the X-Men, a comic-book freak. His fingers weren’t tingling any more, but he didn’t feel any kind of power, either.

Aunt Kim’s lights appeared. The red car came to a stop behind the van. Ned heard her door open and close, saw her approaching, moving quickly, almost running. Her white hair gleamed in the headlights.

He had never been so glad to see anyone in his life.

His aunt looked at him and stopped dead.

“Ned. What happened? Who was here?”

“Cadell, and a druid. There was a boar blocking the
road, they sent it, and then they . . .” It was pretty hard to talk.

“
Sent
it? Why, Ned?”

“They thought we might know where she is.”

She looked around. “Where’s Gregory?”

“Present, ma’am.”

Ned turned quickly. Greg was sitting up, propped on one hand, rubbing at his chest with the other.

“Oh, God. What happened to
you
?”

“Got whomped by the druid guy. Good thing I’m way tough. Viking blood, all the way back.”

Ned shook his head. “Cadell blocked it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“Scared of our telling Phelan, Ysabel learning they were down here. Or maybe he’s . . . not so bad.”

“You mean I’m
not
way tough?”

Aunt Kim managed a smile. “I think you’re tough as horseshoe nails, Gregory. But let’s go up to the house. I don’t like it out here after dark. Not tonight.”

“Hold it,” Ned said.

His hearing seemed to be sharper, too. But a second later the others heard it. Then they all saw the bobbing flashlight beam above them on the roadway.

“Ned? Greg
?” It was his father.

“We’re here!” Kimberly called. “It’s all right.”

The searchers appeared a few seconds later: his dad, Steve, Kate, hurrying down the slope. Ned saw that his father was carrying a hoe. Steve had a shovel.
Kate held the flashlight . . . and a hammer.

“We saw the van’s lights, then they stopped,” his father said. “We got nervous.”

“And charged to the rescue? Like that?” Greg said, standing up carefully. He was still rubbing his chest. “Jeez, you look like extras storming the castle in
Frankenstein
. All you need’s a thunderstorm and accents.”

Ned’s father scowled. “Very funny, Gregory.”

Kate giggled, looking at her hammer. “I couldn’t find a stake,” she said.

Dracula wasn’t that far from the truth here, Ned thought, with risen spirits abroad.

This was all release of tension, and he knew it. They’d been scared, now they weren’t—for a while, anyhow.

“Ned, you okay?” his father asked.

Ned nodded.

It occurred to him that no one had seen what he’d done to Cadell. Greg had been flat on his back, out cold. Ned decided to keep that part to himself. He looked at his aunt.

“What was the name of that figure?” he asked. “The one you mentioned. With the horns. From when we met Cadell.”

Aunt Kim hesitated. “Cernan. Cernunnos. Their forest god.” Her expression changed. “He had them again?”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head. “So much for my powers of intimidation.”

“He left when we felt you coming.”

“As an owl?”

Ned nodded. “I think he
was
worried about you, or at least unsure.”

Aunt Kim made a wry face. “Probably scared of Peugeots. Famous for bad transmissions.”

They were trying to calm him down, Ned realized. He must look pretty freaked out. He managed a smile, but he didn’t seem to be fooling anyone. He kept remembering what he’d done, the feeling of it.

“Let’s go up,” Kimberly repeated. “You two can tell us what happened, but in the house.”

His father said, “Right. Greg, I’ll drive. You can ride shotgun with this.”

Greg eyed the hoe. “Thanks, boss. That’ll make me feel
so
protected.”

He had to be in considerable pain, Ned thought, remembering Greg flying backwards and that crumpled landing. He wasn’t letting on, though. People could surprise you.