Lemon-yellow eyes gleaming in the shadows, the Sandman hunched over Collette Bascombe, clutching her to him, much of her body draped beneath the curtain of his cloak. The starlight blanched his gray flesh to the sickly pallor of a cadaver and his fingers to skeletal bone as he wrapped one hand around her throat and twisted her face round to stare at her brother.
“Collette?” Oliver whispered.
The sand constructs all turned, wretched mouths turning into rictus grins as they started to walk slowly toward him.
His sister flinched at the sound of his voice. He was afraid, for a moment, that the Sandman truly had taken her eyes, but then she leaned away from the monster and he saw her features in the light from the moon and stars that shone through the windows.
“Oliver, you have to run. He’ll kill us both. That’s all he wants. There’s something special about us, something they want to destroy!” she said, voice rising frantically at the last.
The Sandman clapped a hand over her mouth to silence her. The monster, the child-killer, the thing that had murdered Oliver’s father and taken his eyes, did not smile or laugh or even speak. This was no storybook villain.
This is death, Oliver thought.
He gripped the sword tightly, raised it, and started toward the Sandman. Kitsune followed, moving around to his right, careful with each step. Her fur rippled with the muscles beneath and she bared her small, sharp teeth in defiance.
With his free hand Oliver reached into his pocket and withdrew the feather that waited for him there. For a moment he was afraid he would have lost it, but it felt almost warm to the touch.
Oliver held the feather before him like some sort of talisman.
“Dustman,” he said. “It’s time.”
The Sandman’s yellow eyes narrowed, and he flexed the fingers that covered Collette’s mouth. “You confuse me with another legend, foolish Bascombe.”
“Not at all,” Oliver replied.
A new breeze began swirling across the floor in the vast entrance hall of the Sandman’s castle. Dust and grit spun and eddied, and then burst suddenly upward as though something had erupted from within the sand itself.
The breeze died. The dust settled.
Just a few feet away from where Oliver stood, the Dustman brushed sand delicately from the sleeve of his greatcoat. The brim of his bowler obscured his eyes until he glanced up at Oliver.
“I’ll take that,” he said, retrieving the feather from Oliver’s hand. His sand fingers scraped Oliver’s skin.
The Dustman slipped the feather in the pocket of his greatcoat, then reached up with one hand and smoothed down his mustache. He turned toward the Sandman.
“Hello, brother.”
The Sandman had crouched lower, drawn back a few steps, dragging Collette with him. She struggled and he shushed her, glaring.
“You are not welcome here.”
“Nevertheless, here is where I am,” the Dustman said. Then his expression changed, and there was venom in his voice and his eyes. “You are the myth that tales have made you-”
“Don’t you dare call me that!” the Sandman shrieked, hideous black lips pulled back over needle teeth.
He let his hand come away from Collette’s mouth and she cried out Oliver’s name. The monster wrapped her hair in his fist and tugged her backward, drove her down, so that she fell to her knees at his side.
Oliver took a step forward, sword at the ready.
Kitsune snapped a cautionary word at him.
“You were never more than a beast,” the Dustman said, voice dripping with contempt. “But you’ve allied yourself with creatures even more monstrous than yourself, and turned your back on all of your kin. There is nothing for you now but death.”
The Sandman’s lemon eyes went wide and his voice became even more shrill. “My kin? My kin who betrayed me, who allowed me to endure an eternity as captive in my own home? I spurn you all. I spit on you. I shall smear your eyes beneath my heel.”
The Dustman nodded. “Come, then.”
With a mad roar, mouth stretched impossibly wide, the Sandman burst into a cloud of swirling sand, those sickly lemon eyes floating in its midst, and rushed at this new arrival, this creature who had called him brother.
For a moment, Collette choked on the cloud of him, trying to breathe and getting only sand in her mouth and lungs. Coughing, she bent low, throat and chest burning, eyes tightly closed against the scouring sand.
Then she was alone in the center of the room. Wiping at her eyes, she opened them to see the brothers careening toward one another, the Sandman a dervish of wind and grit and the other-Oliver had called him the Dustman-charging as though he were only a man.
Then the Dustman exploded in a wave of dirt and grit and the two miniature storms lashed at one another in the midst of that vast chamber.
Collette rasped, coughing up the sand that had gotten in her mouth and throat. She bent over, still on her knees, hacking and trying to catch her breath, and when she raised her head, she saw her brother running toward her.
From the moment she had seen Oliver, some dam of emotion had given way inside of her. Now even as she wheezed and coughed, Collette managed a flicker of a smile, relief flooding her.
Oliver ran toward his sister.
“Wait! Watch yourself!” called out his companion.
Collette looked over at the gorgeous Asian woman who had arrived with her brother and saw the alarm in the other woman’s face. The cloaked woman pointed and both Oliver and Collette turned to see that the sand-creatures-these horrid constructs that Collette now realized were made in her own image-had begun to close in around them.
The woman wrapped her fur cloak around herself and dropped to all fours. Collette blinked, stunned to see the woman’s entire body shrink in upon itself, the fur tightening around her. Instead of a petite, beautiful woman, she hit the ground as a fox.
The fox, a flash of coppery-red fur in the starlight, leaped at the nearest of the sand creatures. It tried to fight her, batting her away. The fox attacked again, driving her snout into the center of the creature. It collapsed, sand spilling down on top of her.
She shook it off.
The wind inside the Sandcastle howled louder and louder. The sand that comprised the floor and walls seemed to erode so that a dust storm whirled through the vast chamber, partially obscuring her vision.
“Oliver!” Collette cried, at last finding her voice.
Not far away she saw the raging twisters separate, and abruptly the Sandman reformed, standing defiantly in the midst of the driving winds. His cloak whisked around him, but he stood as though entirely untouched. A moment later the Dustman re-formed as well, this sophisticated, evolved brother to the monstrous thing that had been her captor for so long.
The Sandman glared and whispered something that was lost in the wind and the hiss of sand upon sand.
The constructs moved closer, slow as sleepwalkers, eyeless and silent. Oliver called her name and raced at the nearest of them, squinting against the dust storm. Though they had fought as children, she and Oliver had always been close, sharing secrets and troubles and fighting loneliness together in a home with no mother and a distant father. Collette would know her brother anywhere, but looking at him now, she knew that some people would not have recognized him.
Oliver’s hair was wild and he sported several weeks’worth of beard. Normally office-pale, his skin had taken on a healthy, ruddy hue. The peacoat and jeans he wore only added to the overall air of roughness that had transformed him, but the sword in his hands provided the finishing touch.
“Keep away from her!” Oliver bellowed as he raced toward Collette, swinging the blade. He hacked one of the sand creatures in half and it collapsed into a small dune on the chamber floor.
In moments, he and the fox had destroyed two others, and the rest of the sand things began to withdraw to a safer distance. Nearby, the Sandman and the Dustman continued tearing at one another. The Dustman thrust his fist through his brother’s chest so that when he withdrew it there was a gaping hole left behind, but the sand spilled in to fill the gap instantly.