Lemon-yellow eyes peered from beneath the cloak. From the sand.
“Did you think I wouldn’t sense your escape, Bascombe?” the Sandman asked.
Collette swore and took a step backward.
The door behind her slammed closed and she jumped at the noise it made. The Sandman blocked her view of the bedroom with the sleeping boys, but she wondered if the sound had woken them.
Slowly, that door closed as well. She whimpered as the light went away, and the blackness closed in around her. She ought to back up, to claw at the walls, to make herself a new door, but the fear gnawed at her heart.
In the darkness, there were only those yellow eyes.
Something brushed her cheek…the Sandman’s fingers. She batted them away.
There were sounds in the darkness. The swish of his cloak, the rasp of sand against sand. He struck her face, scraping flesh, and she fell to her knees, feeling the sting as blood began to well on her cheek.
Those yellow eyes loomed above her.
“I am not through with you yet,” the Sandman whispered.
“Fuck you,” she snarled, and pistoned her legs to thrust herself upward and grab hold of the Sandman.
Her fingers closed on his arm, and for just a moment his flesh gave way like sand. With a roar, the monster struck her down again, his strength terrible. Her head rang with the blow, but he did not stop there.
Cloak flapping in the darkness, he fell on top of her. His breath was like the desert, and his yellow eyes like poisoned stars. She felt the tips of his talons press against her cheeks, digging in, drawing blood, scratching furrows in her skin that led to the edges of her eyes.
Collette screamed.
“You tempt me so, Bascombe. I want to taste these eyes. The eyes of the Legend-Born. The wishes of my allies mean little when you tempt me so. I care not about the Legend-Born or the cataclysm you may cause. I merely want to feel your eyes pop in my teeth, to taste the warm fluid as it gushes over my tongue. It isn’t very much to ask, after all, is it?”
Those talons pressed harder, drawing tears of blood. Again, Collette cried out.
The Sandman released her. Those yellow eyes floated upward.
“The time has not come. If I were forced to wait much longer, temptation might overwhelm me. But it won’t be long now, girl. Word has come to me. No, it won’t be long at all now.
“We shall simply sit here in the dark together, and wait.”
CHAPTER 18
I n the gray mists of the Winding Way, Oliver had never felt so far from home. The world beyond the Veil was a step beyond the reality that he’d known his whole life, but this mystical road clearly represented a further step. No matter how extraordinary and impossible everything felt in the world of the legendary, everything there was tangible. It might be surreal in Oliver’s mind, but his senses could react to it.
The Winding Way existed as little more than a dream, yet the most lucid of his life. The mist swirled around him and Kitsune with a pulsing, living rhythm-playful and dancing, and sometimes menacing. In the back of his mind Oliver could not shake the idea that, with its awareness, the mist seemed like a ghost…or perhaps an entire sea of ghosts, all reacting to their presence.
It ought to have been entirely dark on the twisting road, for there seemed no source of ambient light. Whatever sky might hang above this mystic limbo through which they passed, the mist blotted out any view of it. And no light from stars or moon-if indeed they existed here-came through that gray shroud. Yet enough light filtered through the mist that it seemed, if not dusk, to be perpetually on the verge of full night.
At first Oliver had been cold, but now the mist felt close and warm so that a film of moisture coated his skin. It was not at all pleasant.
Yet simultaneous with this feeling of separation from his past and distance from the familiar there surged up within him a desperate anticipation. When they left this gray road and emerged again into the realm of the legendary, they would be at the castle of the Sandman. If they survived the encounter, he would be reunited with his sister. When he could throw his arms around her and crush her to him, he knew that nothing in his circumstances would seem quite as terrible. Oliver needed that comfort, even if it was fleeting.
If she’s still alive…
On the Winding Way, doubts seemed to rise like ghosts in the mist and were not easily dispelled. He told himself that Collette was fine, that he would have known somehow if she had died, and that if all of the mysterious things he’d heard were true-or even a fraction of them-the Sandman would have kept her alive as a lure to draw him in.
Which meant that the moment approached where their fates would be decided.
“How much longer?” he whispered. Rather, he’d spoken the words, but something about the Winding Way and its mists turned his voice to a whisper.
Kitsune did not turn. Hidden beneath her hooded cloak, she moved swiftly along the Winding Way, neither walking nor quite running. Oliver hurried to keep up with her, to keep her in sight in the gray mist. The smooth black ribbon of road curved to the left now and he broke into a trot to catch up.
“Kit?” he said, reaching out to touch her.
She slowed and turned toward him even as his fingers grazed her fur cloak. From the abruptness of her reaction he’d thought she might be angry with him, but then he saw the confusion in her eyes. Kitsune blinked several times and shook her head like she was trying to work out some thought that just wouldn’t fit in her mind and could not make its way to her lips.
“What…Kit, what is it?”
They stood there, though the mist swirling around them seemed to urge them onward, trying to sweep them further along the Winding Way.
“We’re here,” she said. “Or very nearly, I think.”
Oliver peered ahead. The black glass road took one more twist. “How does that work?”
Kitsune pushed back her hood and shook her hair out. She glanced over her shoulder at the mist. “It isn’t my magic, but imagine it like a current in an ocean. We step into the Winding Way and we are cast adrift. Except that the magic that created it allows us to alter the current with our desire and our intent, so that we drift to the very shore that is our destination. The road ends for us at the place we wish to go.”
“Anywhere in the Two Kingdoms?”
She frowned and he could see she was distracted. “In the eastern region of Euphrasia, almost anywhere. But only within the region. I have heard that there are other places where the Winding Way leads elsewhere-other currents in the ocean-but have never traveled those roads.”
Oliver studied her face; her eyes were troubled.
“I don’t like it here,” he said.
Kitsune shivered. “Neither do I. But I fear we will soon long for the isolation this place provides.”
They ought to be going. Oliver glanced toward the final twist in the road and then looked at the fox-woman again. The confusion lingered in her face.
“We should go.”
“Yes,” Kitsune said.
“My sister-”
“You asked about the Legend-Born…”
Oliver stared at Kitsune. “Yeah. One of the Hunters used the term, referring to me. You know what it means?”
Kitsune frowned. “Not precisely. But I have heard the term before. Since we set foot upon this road I have been searching my memory for anything I can remember.”
Almost stern, she narrowed her eyes and gazed at him. “You should never have been able to enter the Winding Way, Oliver. I told you-”
“You weren’t sure, though. You said yourself, it’s not your magic. You said-”
A curtain of gray mist swept between them, momentarily obscuring his view of Kitsune so that she was nothing but a vague outline.
“All of that is true, Oliver,” she said, her voice even more of a muffled whisper than it had been before. “I am not like you. I am one of the legendary, a Borderkind. But simply because we’re different does not mean I am some omniscient creature. I know only what I have learned. Legends have facets because they change with the telling, and not every aspect is always true. What I had heard about the Winding Way was that only the legendary could travel upon it.”