He would slay them all.
Whatever Frost’s faults, he was a friend and a leader, and Blue Jay would not allow him to be slain so callously.
At the city’s edge, where the last of the buildings on its outskirts were capped with tall, ugly-faced stone statues, other creatures began to emerge. Some were troll-like creatures with huge mouths in their bellies. Others were animal-human legends: creatures combining frog and man, or crocodile and woman.
The dusk erupted suddenly with a flash of brilliance, and Blue Jay saw a woman step out from between two buildings and spread glorious wings as she transformed into a bird made of pure golden light.
The winged serpents descended. They were even larger than he’d thought, nearly man-sized, and when they alighted on the hill they held themselves up with their twisting, coiling tails, wings furling behind them, claws outstretched. They had burning red eyes like hot coals, and when they hissed they revealed black mouths full of long fangs.
Somewhere he had heard of these things. The name escaped him, but Blue Jay knew they were a breed of vampire.
He steeled himself for battle, and for death.
Then the jaguar-men bowed to Frost. The vampire serpents did the same, bodies undulating as they lowered themselves into a bow and then lifted their heads again. The rest of the creatures followed suit.
“What the bloody hell is this, then?” Grin barked as he and Li caught up to Cheval.
Blue Jay spun through the air and alighted beside the winter man. Beneath his arms, mystic wings shimmered, almost invisible. He stared around at all of these creatures who had intercepted them, and who now had made this unexpected gesture of respect.
“Frost, what’s going on?” he asked.
The winter man smiled, the ice around his mouth cracking, cold mist streaming off of him.
“You haven’t figured it out yet, Jay?” Frost asked, looking at him with mischief in his frozen eyes. “They’re not Hunters.”
Blue Jay stared at the jaguar-men and the vampire serpents, at the gleaming bird of light and the things with the hideous mouths in their bellies.
“These are Borderkind?”
Frost nodded. “This is Yucatazca, not Euphrasia, my friend. A different kingdom. A different world.”
As Blue Jay watched, others streamed out of the city. Humans. Lost Ones, descended from the ancient races that made up this kingdom and the many who had been lost there after its founding.
“What are they doing here?” Cheval asked, stepping up beside Blue Jay in the gathering indigo gloom of dusk. The fires and electrical lights in the city glowed more brightly as darkness fell.
One of the jaguar-men came forward. “They are here to help,” he said, his words heavily accented. “Just as we all are.”
The Lost Ones and strange Yucatazcan Borderkind gathered more closely around the five who had traveled so far.
“Whispers have come down from the north,” the jaguar-man said, cat eyes bright. “The slaughter of our kin has only truly begun in Yucatazca.”
“Clever enough,” Li said, flames sputtering at the corners of his eyes. The patches of ember on his skin continued to spread like virulent infection. “Ty’Lis wanted the Borderkind here to feel safe, as though it was all happening so far away.”
“But we are not fools,” the jaguar-man said, grim-faced as he stared at Frost. “This trouble comes to all of us. The whispers from the north have carried stories of your struggles against the Hunters. When word arrived that you were coming to Palenque, we knew there would be Hunters here to greet you.”
Frost glanced around. With nightfall, the mist that surrounded him seemed to form a cloud that eddied away on the steady current of the warm night wind.
“But there are no Hunters awaiting us.”
If a cat could be said to smile, that is what the jaguar-man did. “Oh, but there were. And other enemies will await you in the city.”
Once again, the jaguar-man bowed, and the rest of those who had gathered there-human and Borderkind alike-did the same.
“We are here to see that you reach the castle and that you find the answers you seek…and that whoever is truly the master of the Hunters is punished.”
Blue Jay laughed softly to himself, relief washing through him. They were not so alone as they had feared. With all of the setbacks they’d had, he’d expected the worst. It was a pleasure to be wrong for once.
Frost glanced at Cheval, who had been studying the jaguar-man intently. This could be a trap, after all, but she had a sense about things, about creatures and the truth in them. She nodded once. The winter man looked at Li and at Grin and then finally at Blue Jay, his expression clearing.
“What are we waiting for?” Blue Jay said, sliding his hands casually into the pockets of his jeans.
Frost nodded and turned to the jaguar-man. “Lead on.”
Collette paced the confines of her prison, trailing her fingers along the hard-packed wall. Her eyes burned with exhaustion and her limbs ached, but she refused to lie down. She would not sleep. The memory of the horror she had witnessed, the Sandman in the bedroom of that little, murdered child, had etched itself in her mind. The only way for her to shake such thoughts was to focus on another memory, the tactile sensation of the sand as it gave way beneath her fingers.
The wall felt hard as concrete, yet it had given way. That had been no hallucination. Now as she dragged her fingers across it, the wall was like sandpaper scraping the soft pads of her fingertips, but when she’d heard the sound of that child crying, she found a way to push through and the sand had gone soft.
How…she wondered. How had she done it?
Without thinking, that was the answer. When the cries of that doomed child had reached her, she had touched the sand and it had changed. When doubt had given way to necessity, something had happened. And, in her very bones, Collette felt sure that the change had not been the Sandman’s doing but her own. He had been furious when she had intruded upon his crime.
So now she walked, clearing her mind of anything save exhaustion. Trudging around and around the circumference of that room, she kept contact with the sand wall and she let the rest of her thoughts go.
“There’s no place like home,” chimed the Vittora. “No place like home.”
Her luck, her doom, both were tied into that little sphere of light. But Collette had found a strange peace within herself. The Vittora waned, growing smaller and dimmer, and she knew that the luck of her life was being leeched away. But somehow, the presence of the death spirit had become a comfort to her, an odd companion in her imprisonment. It did nothing but mutter bits of sentences that might mean nothing and lines from her favorite films, snatched from her brain, but it was hers. If this was her luck and her death, she embraced it.
The air stagnated down in that chamber, despite the arched windows high above. It felt warm and close, but from time to time a cool, errant breeze would reach her.
Collette closed her eyes and continued walking. Almost unconsciously she began to press harder against the wall. Her fingers made a rasping noise as she scraped them on the rough surface. Around and around, increasing the pressure so much that her arm shook and her fingertips were scraped raw.
Then the sand gave way, loose grains cascading down the wall with a shushing sound.
Without opening her eyes, Collette froze in place and pushed her fingers further into the wall, digging them into the sand, her heart leaping at the feel of the dry sand spilling around her wrist.
Turning toward the wall, still with her eyes closed, she pushed her other hand into a spot higher on the wall. The sand yielded to her touch, but only as far as she pushed. Where her thumb brushed the wall, it remained intact.
Unable to hold off any longer, she opened her eyes.
The last rays of the day’s light streamed into the chamber through those high arched windows, casting odd golden shapes upon the upper walls. Nearby, the Vittora hovered in the air. Collette felt sure it had grown larger and brighter while her eyes were closed. Quietly it hummed a familiar tune, something from a film, she was sure.