The Mazikeen glanced sharply at him, eyes narrowed. “I mourn. My brothers are dead. Your kin are being slaughtered, yet you laugh and smile. Why do you not mourn?”
“Whistling in the dark, my friend. Whistling in the dark.”
The Mazikeen wore a quizzical expression but Blue Jay did not bother to explain. He picked up his pace, nodding to Li as he passed. The tiger ran its tongue over long fangs and eyed him hungrily. Li cuffed the back of its head and the tiger snapped at him but did not falter in its stride.
“I had a thought,” Blue Jay said as he caught up to Frost.
The winter man glanced back at the others. They were far enough ahead that their words would not be overheard. “Yes?”
“If we adjust our course slightly southward, it would affect our travel time only a little and put us on a path to pass right by the Sandman’s castle. The one where you and Kitsune and Oliver found all of the dead Red Caps.”
The wave of cold that emanated from Frost in that moment made Blue Jay shiver and his teeth clack together. His eyelashes felt as though ice had formed on them. Blue-white mist rose from the winter man’s eyes.
“Why would we want to do that?” Frost asked.
Anger flashed through the trickster. “Oliver’s sister is his captive, as you well know. We don’t have a way of knowing if Oliver and Kitsune have reached the eastern castle. If we have an opportunity to help and we’re so close, it seems-”
“The Sandman could have Collette Bascombe anywhere. You are correct that we have no way of knowing what has transpired since we parted company with Oliver. But we cannot delay our own efforts another moment, or risk ourselves in any other cause. Oliver and Kitsune have one objective, and the rest of us have another. Or has it not occurred to you that at this very moment, and every other minute that has passed since we set out, other Borderkind may be dying?”
“Of course it has,” Blue Jay snapped.
Frost glared at him, eyes colder than ever. “Keep your focus, Jay. We’ll travel south through the Oldwood, amongst the wild legends, all the way to Yucatazca. They may think to search for us there, but they’ll have a terrible time finding us, and no cooperation in the hunt. All that matters now is reaching Yucatazca.”
His gaze became distant, as though he watched some faraway event, or a future unfolding within his own mind.
“All that matters is my hands around Ty’Lis’s throat.”
On Christmas Eve, Sara Halliwell stood in the living room of her father’s house-the house she had grown up in-and stared out the frosted window at the snow-covered yard. Once she had made snow angels there, had learned to ride a bicycle in the street, had pushed Terry McHugh down in the driveway when he tried to kiss her.
Home.
God, how long had it been since this place felt like home? It was more the ghost of home, the specter of a bittersweet past. The oldest memories were precious to her. Christmas lights in the windows while she snuggled deep under her goose down comforter, raking leaves with her father, spraying her mother with the hose on a long summer day with Daddy watching the Red Sox game on the little TV in the kitchen.
But the more recent memories were different, just a series of awkward pauses and distant looks, of a mother and father who had forgotten how to talk to one another, and consequently, to their daughter. By the time Sara came out to her parents, the fact that she was in love with another girl was barely a blip on the radar of their estrangement. It couldn’t have improved things, but she didn’t think it had made them any worse.
Living in Atlanta, away from them both, had been wonderful at first. Sara had found her mother much easier to get along with from a distance. But her father was another story entirely. How could she have imagined that it was possible for this man-this cop, so completely defined by his occupation and stolen away from his family by the job-to become more distant? Yet he had.
That’s right, she told herself. Keep blaming Daddy. Distance is the space between two people, but it only takes one to reach out and close it.
Sara sighed, breathed in, and her heart was seized by grief and loneliness unlike anything she had ever felt. The place smelled of him, of all the times he hugged her when he’d come home from work, or bent over to kiss her forehead as she lay in bed, when the job brought him home too late. The faded scent of cologne and cigars was in every curtain, in the furniture and the carpets. He did not smoke cigars anymore, except maybe for the occasional holiday, but the aroma remained. It was such a man smell, such a Daddy smell, and it was both foreign and precious to her.
How could you have let this happen? she thought, and couldn’t be sure if the admonition was directed at her father, or herself. All the time that had gone by, all of the phone calls asking her to come home, and at last she had been drawn home for Christmas when it was too late.
Out the window, she could see the gleam of Christmas lights that had been strung across the frames of neighboring houses. The old Standish house still used the multicolored ones in their trees and above the door, but where the Quinns had once lived, the new family used those bright white lights that she thought were so cheerless and sad. Still, the effect of the various decorative lights all along the street gave a holiday warmth to the scene, gleaming off the snow.
But inside Ted Halliwell’s house, there wasn’t even a tree. He hadn’t bothered with lights or decorations of any kind. Sara understood. He had asked her to come home and she had said no, so what was the point of decorating? He wouldn’t do it for himself. Someone would invite him over for Christmas dinner-Sheriff Norris, maybe-and he’d probably go, but there would be no celebration for him.
No. Stop it. Don’t you feel sorry for him. He could have been different, could have changed it anytime he set his mind to it.
But that was the tragedy. Her father had tried to change. Sara could not escape the truth now. How many times in the past few years had he reached out to her, tried to heal the past and bring them closer together, and how many times had she put him off, telling herself she wasn’t ready to forgive him yet for not being there for her?
So many.
She reached out to trace her fingers through the frosty condensation on the window. Christmas Eve existed out there in the world of Bosworth Road, but here, inside, it was so far away.
“Where are you, Dad?” she whispered to the winter night.
Somehow, she had to find out what happened to him. She could haunt Jackson Norris, but knew the sheriff wasn’t going to have any answers for her. If she wanted to know what happened, she had to go and talk to the people at Bascombe amp; Cox, who’d sent her father and Julianna Whitney to London, searching for the missing lawyer.
But it was Christmas Eve, and nobody was going to be looking for her father or even thinking about him much for the next two days. Nobody except her. The time between now and December 26 stretched out before her as an endless void. She could do nothing but wait for the rest of the world to celebrate and revel in love and holiday spirit, and that helplessness was a terrible weight upon her heart.
Sara needed to understand what had happened. Her father had always felt so far away from her, even when they lived in the same house. Yet in some strange way, she felt closer now, as though if she turned at the right moment and glanced into the corner, she would see him in the shadows. It was as though, if she reached out at the right moment, she would be able to grab him and pull him close. That was something she had not done since grade school, but now she felt like she could hug him without resentment getting in the way, if only she could find him.
Her father was still alive. She refused to believe otherwise. But it felt like his ghost haunted the house.
Sara turned away from the window and strode to the enormous bookshelf that stood against one wall. There was a CD player there and she turned it on. Christmas Eve it might be, but there’d be no holiday music for her. She pressed Play and blinked in surprise when the music started, because she recognized it immediately. Diana Krall sang “I’m an Errand Girl for Rhythm.” Sara had this CD herself. She favored cute little folk-rock boys like Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson and jazz-pop from Jamie Cullum, but there was something so beautiful and sultry about Diana Krall’s voice that Sara fell a little in love with her every time she heard her sing.