Over and over, they tore one another apart.
Then Oliver was at her side.
“Collette!” he said, pulling her into an embrace with his free hand.
She fell against him, melting into the pleasure of his company. She was no longer alone in this nightmare place. Her little brother was here with her. Together, everything would be different.
“Hey, little bro,” she rasped.
Oliver held her at arm’s length and they grinned like fools at one another. His expression wavered first.
“We have a lot to talk about.”
Collette nodded. “Oh, yeah. You’re pretty much the only thing I’m sure is real in this whole world. I’ve got a lot of questions. And some things you should know. But can we-”
“Get the hell out of here, first?” her brother said.
The fox trotted up beside him. Though still in motion, her size altered abruptly. Her fur rippled and came loose, hanging down around her, and then as though she were removing her face, the fox drew back her hood to reveal once again the elegant features of the Asian woman who’d arrived with her brother.
“Jesus!” Collette said, flinching and staring at her. “I just…I don’t think I know what’s real!”
Oliver put a comforting hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead. “There’s an easy answer to that, sis. Everything. Everything is real. This is Kitsune.”
He turned to the fox-woman, whose green eyes were close to the most hypnotic things Collette had ever seen. “And Kit, this is my sister, Collette.”
Kitsune inclined her head. “A pleasure to meet you. But we really ought to go, now, while the battle rages.” She gestured toward the center of the room where the Sandman and Dustman tore at one another, blasts of grit bursting from their bodies with each blow and re-forming in the swirling, howling wind.
Oliver hesitated. “Shouldn’t we help the Dustman?”
Collette had known there was some connection, that somehow they had summoned the creature, but this was confirmation.
“What could we do?” she said. “You haven’t seen what he-”
“I know what he does,” Oliver said, grief in his eyes. “What he is.”
Kitsune nodded. “We should go. If the Dustman cannot destroy the Sandman, there’s nothing we can do to help him. He agreed to come, knowing what this war would bring.”
“All right,” Oliver said. “We go.”
Collette kept up with them as best she could. Oliver had his arm around her, helping even as he kept his sword at the ready. Kitsune led the way by a dozen paces and they raced for the door. The sand creatures, those horrible images of her, did not attempt to bar the way.
The door stood open. Fresh air blew in.
When they went out of the Sandcastle, they found an army waiting.
CHAPTER 19
H alliwell snapped the reins on his horse and spurred her forward, moving up beside Julianna. The chill night wind raised goosebumps on his flesh but he did not feel cold. In truth, he felt nothing. Exhausted and aching, his butt and thighs pummeled by days on horseback, he felt like a bag of cold and brittle bones.
His frayed nerves felt dulled. The panic that had roiled inside of him for so long had abated with the numb sameness of the hours of their journey. Though they had a clear goal-and Captain Beck’s soldiers seemed anxious to reach it-Halliwell felt as though it was all quite pointless. The only things that kept him moving were the horse beneath him and the need to meet Oliver Bascombe face-to-face. Halliwell would ask him the questions he had waited so long to ask, though by now the only one that seemed important was the one he felt sure he already knew the answer to.
Oliver would almost certainly tell them what Hunyadi and Virginia Tsing and Kara had all told them: they were damned to stay in this world, lost forever to the one they had known.
And then Halliwell could die.
Even in the midst of his malaise, he could not have failed to notice the change in Julianna. The journey had been good for her, as though the exposure to the daytime sun and the cold night air had purified her.
Maybe it was the food that King Hunyadi’s soldiers had shared with him and Julianna along their journey, or just long-term exposure to the…he hated to even think the word, but the magic of this place. From the time they had left Hunyadi’s summer residence with Captain Damia Beck and the detachment of soldiers under her command, Julianna had been filled with a sense of purpose. She had a mission now, and with Oliver at the other end of that mission, she had faith that she would have him in her arms again, and that answers would finally be forthcoming.
Halliwell didn’t have faith in anything anymore.
“Damia says we’re close now,” Julianna said.
She gave Halliwell a sidelong glance but he could read nothing in it. The part of her that was a lawyer, a determined professional, had recently returned to the fore. She behaved not like a woman searching for her lost fiance, but like… well, like a cop, Halliwell thought.
“Hours?” Halliwell asked.
Julianna had obviously been trained to ride. A young New England girl from a wealthy family, she’d probably been on horseback practically before she could walk. She rode upright in the saddle and had total command of her horse. When her mount moved a few feet further away from his and picked up its pace ever so slightly, Halliwell felt certain it was quite purposeful.
“Minutes,” she said.
And turned her face away.
That was when he understood why she’d moved ahead. She did not trust her expression to remain neutral during this exchange. They sought Oliver Bascombe for very different reasons, and Halliwell’s were not altogether pleasant. Julianna did not trust him anymore.
“Minutes,” he said, tasting the word upon his tongue.
Jaw set, he spurred his horse to move a bit faster, catching up with Julianna though he said nothing further to her. It was not a time for chatter. There had been enough talk about what was to come. Even over the course of this journey they had avoided the subject of its end. Julianna had instead engaged Damia Beck and her soldiers in conversation about the Two Kingdoms and the Lost Ones, and from the fugue of his numbness, Halliwell had listened.
At Twillig’s Gorge they had learned a great deal about the legendary and the Borderkind, but by now they realized that ordinary humans-the distant cousins of the people who walked the streets of the world they knew-ruled the Two Kingdoms and most of the rest of the world on this side of the Veil.
In a world of wonders, there was still a place for an ordinary man.
Halliwell should have found some comfort in that. But he could not. If he could never return to his little house in Maine, never see his daughter again, that was the end. There was nothing for him here.
Instead of ruminating on it, he held the reins and he ground his teeth to contend with the pain in his hindquarters from the constant riding. Oliver and this trickster woman, Kitsune, whom he was supposed to be traveling with, had a head start on them, but according to Captain Beck, they hadn’t been going directly to the Sandman’s castle.
The Sandman’s fucking castle. Listen to yourself, he chided. And yet that was only reflex. As absurd as such a thing would once have seemed to him, he knew the truth of it now. Much to his regret.
They rode now, a dozen of Hunyadi’s soldiers and a pair of cast-a-ways from another world, up a long ridge between two mountain peaks. This part of Euphrasia had a breathtaking beauty and elegance, even in the villages they had passed. The bridges and homes and gardens had all been constructed so as to blend into the landscape.