Seconds later they were out onto the street, racing into the darkness and grime of an unknown Austrian town, headed for Vienna in a stolen car.
The policeman would not be able to give chase. There would be others, Kitsune knew, but if they could get out of this little industrial town without being caught, she felt sure they would reach Vienna.
“What just happened?” Oliver said, and she was sure the question was directed more to himself than to her, so she did not respond. “Why are they after me?”
Kitsune said nothing, only watched the troubled expression on his pale features as oncoming headlights washed over them. She reached out and put a comforting hand upon his thigh. They drove in silence, the echo of unanswered questions drowning out anything else they might have wished to say to one another.
CHAPTER 13
T he Vittora no longer spoke, not even nonsense words. Even the insinuating tone of its quotes from her favorite films had ceased. Collette sat propped against the grating sand wall of her strange cell, turned to one side, legs drawn up beneath her. She had made herself very small, there in that rounded prison. The moon and starlight that came through the high, arched windows provided no comfort. As though she lay in her bed at home and could burrow underneath the bedclothes for protection and privacy, she huddled there, lost in thought.
Her mind wandered, lulled and lured by the voice of the Vittora. It no longer spoke to her, but that did not mean it was silent. Rather, its voice had become a ceaseless song, a high, childlike, singsong melody that segued from “Over the Rainbow” to “As Time Goes By” to “In Your Eyes” and on through others before starting all over again. This perversion of the music from her favorite films had begun to tear down her passion for those cherished memories. The incessant humming was quickly becoming the soundtrack for her madness.
The Vittora, she’d been told, comprised all her hope. Its separation from her flesh was harbinger to her doom. Yet as she drew her limbs even more tightly to herself, it occurred to her that the Vittora might be the place she was storing the fear and hysteria that she ought to have been feeling.
In that moonlit pit, she sat in her filthy pajamas with sand in every conceivable crevice, the stale smell of her own body in her nose, and the stubble of her unshaven legs prickly under the cotton. The Vittora was a tiny sphere of light, no larger now than a baseball-a golden glow that flickered and swayed on the other side of the chamber as though taunting her.
But as much as she hated the thing and wanted to snuff it out completely, Collette felt certain that as long as the Vittora remained, she would not succumb entirely to terror. As long as the Vittora remained, she could think.
A vast abyss seemed to open up beneath her. Collette felt the pull of it, as though she teetered on the edge and would tumble into it any moment.
“Up,” she whispered.
With that single syllable, she placed one hand on the wall and practically leaped to her feet. The Vittora hummed the tune for the Lollipop Guild and Collette laughed under her breath. Images of the Munchkins of Oz blossomed in her mind but were quickly replaced by small children, mutilated by the Sandman.
“Fucker.” Her voice was a dry rasp. It seemed she had not had anything to eat or drink for a while, and presumed that her captor was punishing her for spying on him or trying to escape, or both.
The question is how, she thought. How the hell did you do that?
The Vittora sang softly, as though to itself. Collette turned her back on it, half wishing the thing would simply disappear despite what that might mean. She stared at the gently curved wall, at the glitter of small bits of quartz or other reflective mineral in the sand.
Brow furrowed, she reached out and pressed the tips of her fingers against the wall. Nothing. It was entirely unyielding. Adding pressure, she tried to dig her fingers in, staring at the sand, at her ragged fingernails. Gritting her teeth, she put her weight into it, trying to drive her nails in. A little dart of pain shot up her ring finger and she hissed and pulled away, sucking on that finger, wondering if she had torn the nail.
Where was the door?
With only her palm, she brushed against the hard, abrasive surface of the sand wall, but it was truly like cement. She had been around and around her cell, probing for another soft place like the one she had discovered before, and found nothing.
Home. Collette had felt it, sensed it, tasted and smelled it. That bedroom, where the child had been horribly murdered, existed back in her own world. The place she was supposed to be. The Sandman could pass back and forth between the two worlds.
“So did he let me through, or did I dig my own way?” she whispered to the wall, to the night.
The Vittora paused and for a moment she thought it would give one of its nonsense replies, but then it began humming again, a shrill melody that she recognized from childhood, from some Disney film or other, though she could not place it precisely.
She ignored it.
Focused on the wall, she tried again to press her fingers into the sand, working the tips against the wall. Grimly determined, she slid her fingers across the hard surface, testing again and again. Useless. The wall was only a wall and her fingers could not penetrate.
It had to have been the Sandman, making the sand malleable, giving her the chance to follow. The creature had allowed her to dig away at soft sand and find that door and see what she had seen.
But then, why was he so furious?
The question lingered. She remembered quite well the way it felt to plunge her fingers into the yielding sand and to excavate that door that led out of her prison. It had certainly felt as though she was doing it herself.
Collette took a long, shuddering, exhausted breath and pressed her forehead against the wall. The sand scraped her skin, but in frustration she pressed harder and began to slide her forehead to the left, welcoming the sting, the million little shards of pain. She hissed in through her teeth, but then she just stood like that, head leaning on the wall, hands pressed against it on either side of her. The Vittora hummed high and shrill, and now she knew the song.
“I’ve got no strings…to hold me down,” she sang along, voice quaking.
With a shout, she struck the wall. Pain jammed her knuckles.
Something shifted elsewhere in the cell. Rustled. Collette spun and glanced around. The Vittora had stopped its childlike humming and had shrunk to a mere pinprick of illumination. In the light of the moon, she stared around at the haunting gloom of the rounded cell and saw that she was indeed still alone.
The sound came again. A shifting rustle, something familiar about it.
And then she knew: feathers.
Collette craned her neck back and looked up. One of the skeletal creatures she had seen before was crouched in an arched window, green-feathered wings black in the moonlight. Its enormous tangle of antlers hung heavy upon its head. She blinked a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust, and she could barely make out the gleam of its eyes.
“What do you want?” she demanded, hating the tinny, frantic sound of her voice.
The Hunter only perched there, limbs jutting at harsh angles. After a moment it gave a birdlike cock of its head and seemed to study her even more closely. A shiver went through Collette. Its antlers threw moonlight shadows down upon the floor of the cell like the twisted branches of some looming tree outside her bedroom one stormy night.
But there was no storm here. No sound, save a barely audible wind and the rustle of its wings as the Hunter shifted its weight again.
“Stop…why are you just staring at me like that? What do you want ?”
It spread its wings and rose, legs tensed, about to take flight.