Adrenaline and terror propelled him forward, staggering to his feet even as he kept up his momentum. His hands were bright with pain, but it felt far away and unimportant.
Kitsune stepped from the shadows and grabbed his wrist. For a moment he’d thought she had left him behind. Now they raced down the alley together, behind the embassy and then between two other buildings. Oliver felt like an idiot. If he’d been running on his own he would have gone back the way they’d come, right past the front doors, and probably been shot dead in the street.
There were shouts and the staccato footfalls of their pursuers, but there were no more gunshots, and soon they had left even that behind in the narrow back alleys of Vienna. The police would be out in force soon, searching for them, but the guards at the British embassy had no jurisdiction to shoot people in the streets of the Austrian capital.
Oliver had long since lost track of their location when Kitsune led him around a corner and he saw the Danube churning by only a hundred yards away.
Slowly, catching her breath, she took his hand again and together they walked to the riverbank. The darkness still clung to the sky, but night would soon be over and Christmas day would dawn. The river raced by, the current powerful, but even so, it was cold enough that ice had formed along its edges, drifting and breaking and spinning on the water.
Kitsune smiled at him, tugging him toward the river.
Then Oliver understood. He stopped, trying to pull her back. “Kit, no. It’s freezing.”
“Public space, remember?” she said. “Do you know Vienna well enough to find us a place to cross through the Veil before dawn, before the police catch up with us?”
Oliver sighed. “You know I don’t.”
Kitsune raised her hood, jade eyes gleaming in the dark. “I’ll keep you warm,” she said.
Together, they leaped into the Danube, and through the Veil.
Oliver lay in a shallow creek, barely more than a trickle, his clothes soaked through from splashing into the Danube. Back on the mundane side of the Veil-the place he thought of less and less as his own world-it had still been dark, the sky that pure indigo of the hour before dawn. But in the realm of the legendary, it was midday and the sun shone, drawing rich colors out of the landscape. Trees seemed remarkably green, the sky extraordinarily blue, and the coppery fur of Kitsune’s cloak a brighter red than ever before.
It occurred to Oliver that perhaps this sharpness of color, the vividness of the world around him, might well be an aftereffect of the exultant feeling of escaping with his life. If so, he appreciated that there was at least one benefit to their circumstances.
The air felt cool, the water outright cold, yet he lay there and shivered, feeling the stones beneath him, even through his clothes, and the little rivulets that streamed around him.
Oliver let his head loll to one side and glanced at Kitsune. She shook herself, water spraying from her fur cloak. The absurdity of it and the exultation of their escape must have touched her as well. Giddy, they began to laugh.
“That…was a close one,” Oliver managed.
Kitsune sighed, corners of her lips still turned up in a broad smile. The sun lit her features so that it seemed she had her own internal luminescence.
“Far too close. When you finally get all of your troubles sorted out and go home, you’re going to have quite a time explaining yourself.”
Oliver’s laughter died. Thoughts of home led to thoughts of Julianna, and he stared at Kitsune-her beauty painful to regard-and any trace of humor died.
“What is it?” she asked, still lying there beside him in the small brook.
“I’m not sure what ‘home’ even is anymore,” he said, surprising himself with the honesty of his answer. “After all of this, I don’t know what’ll be left to go back to. If Julianna’s gone…”
His time with the Borderkind had irrevocably altered him. There was no denying that. And with all that had happened, there were a great many people who had questions for him that he would find impossible to answer. Trouble waited for him back in his world. But his house, his childhood home, that waited as well. And his job. His friends.
But without Julianna, none of that mattered.
Kitsune reached out until her fingertips grazed his, the water rushing over their hands. “Then don’t go back.”
Oliver stared at her, letting her fingers play against his.
“I love her, you know,” he said softly.
Her eyes narrowed and she pulled away. Tendrils of her hair streamed in the brook, and as she lifted her head, water dripped and ran down her cloak, which glistened with droplets.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“And I’ll find her.”
Kitsune moved away from the brook a few paces and thrust out her tongue as though using it to test the wind-or taste the wind. Oliver watched the stiffness in her manner, the formality that seemed to have returned to her every gesture, and he rose from the brook in a cascade of water and regret.
He had survived this long partly due to Kitsune’s help. Had she not accompanied him, he surely would have been long since dead. But for the first time he began to think that it would be best if he and Kit parted ways. Traveling with her clouded his mind, when he desperately needed focus.
To think he didn’t have a home to go back to-that was pure foolishness. When Collette had been in the midst of her divorce and things had gotten ugly, both financially and personally, she’d called the process triage. In catastrophic circumstances, doctors had to make hard decisions, focusing first on the patients who were horribly injured, but not so far gone that they were likely to die even with treatment.
You saved what you could, one problem at a time.
Oliver knew that his homecoming would be problematic when the time came, but between then and now he had to do triage. Save Collette. Save himself. Help the Borderkind if he could. Then get himself home to Julianna and whatever else awaited him.
So, much as he hated the chill that had just descended between himself and Kitsune, Oliver only followed as she walked away.
For nearly an hour they wandered across fields and along cart paths lined with delicate-looking trees and low shrubs with tiny leaves. Kitsune seemed unsure of their direction, but Oliver dared not question. At length they came to a small settlement not large enough even to warrant the word village. Most of the dwellings appeared to be temporary, some no more than tents. Herds of sheep and cows grazed freely on the surrounding hills, not penned but guarded by shepherds with a distinctly eastern aspect. They wore wool vests against the chill, and some had headgear fashioned from fur that reminded Oliver of nothing so much as warriors who would have bowed to the commands of a sultan.
As they made their way into the settlement, men and women alike watched them warily. Oliver saw no weapons, but the Sword of Hunyadi hanging at his hip gave him great comfort.
Kitsune walked ten steps ahead, as though she were his mistress and he some lowly servant. This might have been some affectation for the benefit of their observers, the haughty Borderkind keeping the ordinary man in his place, but Oliver did not think so. The hood of her cloak framed her face, casting her features in shadow so that for once he could not even see the jade gleam of her eyes. He was quite sure this was precisely the effect she desired.
Oliver rested his palm upon the handle of his sword. If she wished for him to appear as though he was some servant or bodyguard, he would. The mid-afternoon shadow stretched before him, making a pantomime of his actions, transforming him into a fierce warrior giant. Yet Oliver knew that shadows were only strange contortions of the truth.
After they had passed through the entire encampment, Kitsune waited on the far side. Oliver thought for a moment she was waiting for him, but then an old woman emerged from one of the large tents and began to shamble toward them, accompanied by a pair of men in horned fur caps. These two carried spears, the first weapons he’d seen.