Spirits White as Lightning Read online

  Paul entered along with the fourth of the House's Guardians, José Ramirez. José was the building's super, handling the House's rare mechanical breakdowns, and a breeder of African Grey parrots. He was short and stocky, with the build of someone who lifted weights for use, not show, and the dark craggy features of an Indio Charles Bronson. Of the four Guardians, it was hardest for Eric to imagine how José had wound up as a mystical champion of the Light: he seemed so incredibly pragmatic and down-to-earth, not to mention fully involved in both day job and avocation. Eric had visited his apartment a few times—it was almost entirely given over to the birds. To Eric they looked like budgies on steroids, but there was no doubt that José loved them—or that his love was returned.

  The last of the stragglers had arrived by eight, and the apartment was filled with eddies of talk and laughter. Earlier in the day Eric had filled his CD player with an eclectic mix calculated to appeal to everyone—some old favorites, some new finds—and more than once he caught people paging through the stack of jewel cases, trying to identify the music that was playing. The pizzas had vanished early, but Margot had brought cookies—someone usually did—and Eric had laid in a more than sufficient supply of sodas to fuel conversations far into the wee small hours.

  Jimmie had looked pretty beat when she'd walked in tonight. Eric had put that down to the stress of her job—in addition to everything else, the NYPD rotated shifts on a six-week basis, which meant she was always having to get used to new hours—but as the evening passed, the lines of stress in her striking face became more pronounced, not less. Something worse than usual was eating at her, something good friends and conversation couldn't touch.

  "Want to talk about it?" Eric asked.

  He'd followed her into the kitchen when she'd gone to get a refill on her tea. Eric had found that a Mr. Coffee did a good job of keeping a pot of herbal tea hot for hours—and after six or seven hours of steeping, even chamomile would get as dark as Lipton's.

  Jimmie sighed, not turning around. "Is it that obvious?"

  "Only to someone who knows you," Eric answered. "I'm surprised the others haven't been on your case about it already."

  "What makes you think they haven't?" she asked, turning around, cup in hand, and leaning against the sink. "The only trouble is, none of us can figure this out. I was just about desperate enough to ask you for advice," she finished, with a faint ironic smile.

  Eric smiled back, although he was now a lot more worried than he had been before. The Guardians were good folks, but they tended to be . . . insular. Jimmie's flat refusal to put civilians on the firing line was only the more extreme manifestation of the Guardians' general desire not to involve outsiders—no matter how magical—in their business. Either you were already in it up to your neck, so their reasoning ran, or you should take the chance to go live a peaceful, normal life and run with it. The fact that Jimmie was willing to consult him was proof that the Guardians were at the end of their considerable resources.

  "Consider the doctor in," he said, doing his best to cloak his unease with lightness.

  Jimmie took a deep breath, obviously organizing her thoughts. Eric glanced over his shoulder, but no one had followed them into the kitchen, and the hum of talk and music was still at an even level. They wouldn't be disturbed.

  "Okay. For about the past . . . six months, maybe a little longer, I've been having nightmares. They sort of come with the territory, I know, but these have been something special. Fires, open graves, things . . . chasing me. Pretty grim.

  "We tried to figure out a reason for them, sure, but it's been pretty quiet magically since Aerune tried his little stunt last winter. They can't really be coming from outside, not with my shields and the House's. And besides, Greystone doesn't pick up a thing—at least, not until I wake up screaming. As for work . . . well, the job is the job, and it never changes. But the dreams have. They've gotten more frequent, and they've gotten worse." She shrugged, glancing up momentarily to meet Eric's eyes. "I'm starting to think maybe I ought to take some personal leave."

  These nightmares must be something pretty bad, Eric thought. He frowned. While he could certainly use his magic—with her help and consent—to give her sweet dreams in place of the nightmares, it would only be a temporary solution. The real question was what could break through a Guardian's shields and leave no trace for the House—or Greystone—to sense?

  "And you don't think they're coming from outside."

  Jimmie shook her head.

  "But they could be." Eric cudgeled his brains to remember all Master Dharniel's lessons on magic, but the Sidhe Magus hadn't been big on lectures. Dharniel had been more the "learn by doing" type. "You've pretty much settled that this isn't something coming from within—if it were, it would probably have resolved itself by now. And I know that the House's shields would stop pretty much everything, but if you have blood-kin, they can almost always get through any shields you can raise. . . ." His voice trailed off. As far as he knew, Jimmie didn't have any living relatives.

  "Mom's dead. Dad's dead. But . . ." Jimmie stopped with a heavy sigh. "There's still someone. He's as good as dead, though."

  "Someone close to you?" Eric asked, feeling uncomfortably that he was prying into things that weren't any of his business.

  Jimmie Youngblood smiled bitterly. "Once upon a time I had an older brother. I went into the Academy because of him—he was a cop, like Dad and Grampa. I wanted to be just like him. Only it turned out that he wasn't a cop just like Dad and Grampa. He . . . cut corners. Did things that no cop can do and stay clean. Dad found out about five minutes before Internal Affairs did. He turned El—my brother—in. He left the Force, and that was that."

  "Do you know where he is now?"

  "Eric, I don't even know if he's alive," Jimmie said in frustrated exasperation.

  "My advice? Better find him," Eric said. "I can play you a charm to give you temporary relief, so you can get some rest, but all it will be is a stopgap. It won't make the dreams go away. And from the kind of dreams you've been having, I'd say it's a possibility that this guy might be in trouble."

  Serious trouble.

  THREE:

  A DARK HORN BLOWING

  In this forest it was always night. A red moon hung eternally overhead, its scarlet light turning the landscape below to ebony and blood, hiding the brambles and pitfalls that could trap a running man. The damp air resounded to the call of hunting horns and the howls of the pack. Whatever mortal encountered them was doomed, for they were the hounds of the Wild Hunt, and once set upon a scent, they never failed to take their prey.

  He had seen them succeed four times before. He was the fifth and last, and sometime in this eternal night his end would come in the same way as that of all the others.

  He did not know how long any of them had been here, suffering the tender mercies of their tormentor. Weeks or months—or maybe even years. The old stories said that time ran differently under the Hollow Hills than it did on Earth. But the time of year was the least of his worries.

  Staying alive as long as he could—and dying well—was what mattered now. Was all that mattered now.

  He stopped for a moment, his back to the trunk of a tree of no earthly species, alert for the sound of the Hunt. If he could survive until dawn, he was free. That was what they'd told Hauman, and for a while all of them had hoped to escape—until they realized that in this world, dawn never came.

  His antlers caught in the tree's branches. He shook his head irritably as he freed them. They were another part of the trap. There was no way to remove them. Once Aerune had strapped the gleaming silver antlers to your head, only death would release you. That was one of his tricks, and the Sidhe lord had a lot of them. Elkanah Youngblood had sampled them in plenty during his captivity.

  Had the blonde bitch known what Aerune would do to them when she'd abandoned them here? Elkanah hoped so. It made Ria Llewellyn easier to hate, and hate was the only thing that gave him the strength to go on. There
was no point in hating Lord Aerune—it would be like hating a mountain, or the sea, or the night itself. Aerune was too inhuman to hate, but Elkanah could fear him, and he did.

  Too late now to wish he'd never followed Lintel's orders back in the day, nor followed the path that had brought him to the outlaw life of a hired gun. Too late to wish he'd died before Robert Lintel had magicked them all into Aerune's court with his captive espers. Too late to wish he'd turned his own gun on himself while he still could, before he'd become Aerune's prisoner. All that mattered now was surviving as long as he could without going mad. Or maybe going mad was better. Elkanah didn't know.

  The one thing he did know was that it was marginally better to be ripped apart by the hellhounds pursuing him than to fall into the hands of the huntsmen. Liverakos had made that mistake. He'd held off the dogs until the Hunt had joined them. He'd hoped for clemency, or for a clean death. Instead, it had taken him hours to die, flayed alive slowly by creatures who fed on human pain.

  And all of them—the surviving Threshold mercs—had been forced to watch.

  Elkanah didn't know how often Aerune held these hunts. Time had no meaning here. There was being asleep, and being awake, and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two. When Aerune got tired of his petty torments, then it was time for another hunt. They'd never known who'd be chosen next to wear the silver antlers. Elkanah had that small advantage over those who had gone before him. When the last of the others had died in the hounds' jaws, he'd known he'd be next. Maybe that was why Aerune had played him as long as he did, tormenting him with the hope it wouldn't end for him the way it had for all the others. But this morning—it was impossible not to use the word, even though it was meaningless in this world—Aerune had summoned him to the throne room, and Elkanah had known his time had come.

  And now he was here in the bone-wood.

  The bone-wood was filled with bare, leafless trees like nothing on Earth. Even when there was no wind, the branches moved, rubbing against each other to produce a sound eerily like human whispering. Maybe if you listened long enough, you could understand what the trees said. Elkanah hoped he'd be dead before then.

  Though he suspected spring and autumn never came to this place, the forest floor was covered with dead and rotting leaves. Thickets of leafless bramble grew between the trees, a trap for unwary prey, and somewhere beyond the bone-wood itself was a meadow—covered with sere dry grass that had never been green—and a river. He'd used every moment of the other Hunts to try to make a map of the territory in his mind, hoping it would serve him when his own time came.

  Except for the silver antlers upon his head, Elkanah was as naked as any other hunted animal. They'd given him a head start before they released the hellhounds—the Unseleighe Sidhe had a warped notion of fair play—and he'd had a long time to plan for this day.

  There was no way out of the forest, and no point in waiting for a dawn that would never come. The only hope he had—and all it amounted to was a choice of deaths—was to make the hunt last as long as possible, so that the rade got bored and didn't follow the pack very closely. Then he could be sure that the pack would tear him to bits before the hunters reached him. Until that time, he needed to confuse them, lay a maze of false trails, and use every way there was to throw them off the scent. The times he'd ridden with the Hunt to watch the others die would help him there. He could almost say he knew this forest.

  The horns sounded again, closer this time, and he could hear the baying of the hounds. They were huge, monsters, like a wolf in a nightmare: four feet at the shoulder, with ivory fangs as long as his thumb and pupilless red eyes that glowed with the light of hellfire. His daddy'd been a jackleg preacher when he wasn't hard at work at his real job, and in his youth Elkanah had heard all about Hell and its creatures. He could say he knew the territory. If this wasn't Hell, it was the next best thing.

  He turned, and began moving away from the pack at a slow, ground-eating lope. The river was near here. He could wade along it for a few hundred yards, then cross over and double back on his tracks. That should confuse them for a while. Later he'd find a tree to climb, move from branch to branch. Anything to throw them off the scent. He could even pretend that he hoped he could make it to the edge of the forest—assuming it had an edge. Hope could keep you alive, or it could kill you. Right now, hope and determination were the only things he had.

  He heard the river long before he reached it. He had to force his way through a thicket of thorns to reach it, and he was bleeding from a hundred scratches by the time he made his way to the water. The surface of the water shone balefully red in the moonlight, and for a moment he worried about what might lay beneath its surface. The river was wider than he remembered, but the far bank was an easy slope. But Agel had made it across before he died, and Aerune's Hunt had forded it without difficulty. He had to try.

  When he stepped into the water, it was as cold as liquid ice. The scratches on his body burned, a silver tracery of fire, before the cold numbed them. Gritting his teeth, Elkanah forced himself deeper, striking out with powerful strokes for the center. The current would be faster there, and do some of his work for him. Always providing the Hunt wasn't awaiting him downstream, knowing he would do precisely this.

  Indecision is your worst enemy. On the battlefield, even a bad decision is better than none, he told himself grimly. You've made your plan, now stick to it.

  The cold sapped his strength and made his heart hammer madly. He let the current carry him downstream as long as he dared before striking out for the far bank, knowing he had to save some of his strength to battle his way there. He didn't dare try to drown, though surrendering to the water's chill kiss was tempting. Aerune's healers were too skilled for him to risk it. He'd seen them work on the others, bringing a man back from the edge of death to be tortured again. The death that was his only way of winning this game had to be certain . . . and final.

  But it was almost a greater effort than he was capable of to drag himself out of the water, and for long moments Elkanah crouched in the thick grass of the bank, gasping and shuddering with the cold. Only terror and determination forced him to his feet to stagger onward through the wood again. All around him the trees seemed to whisper to themselves as he passed, and he no longer cared if what he saw and heard was real or imaginary. Anything might be true here. The only thing he had going for him was the fact that the Unseleighe Sidhe didn't like to have their games spoiled. Nothing in this forest would hinder him as he ran, or do anything to cheat the Wild Hunt of its sport.

  At least, they never had yet. He'd seen some of the other things that lived here—black horses with cloven hooves and ram's horns, small silvery fox-things that sobbed and cried like children, glowing women as insubstantial as mist. Creatures of nightmare, only here the nightmares didn't end with waking.

  Each time he stopped to rest it seemed like only moments before he heard the hounds again, baying close behind as they followed his trail. He crossed a second, shallower stream, and Elkanah spent several minutes circling back and forth through it, making a tangled scent for the hounds to follow, before forging onward. The ground began to rise, and he realized that the trees were becoming smaller and farther apart.

  This was a part of the Night Lands he'd never seen before on any of the Hunts. Perhaps if he reached the top of the ridge ahead, he might find sanctuary. A cave to hide in. Something. He had to hope, had to fool himself that he wouldn't die tonight. It was the only way he could manage to get through this, and put himself at last beyond Aerune's reach.

  His entire body trembled with exhaustion, and his throat and lungs burned with each rasping breath he took. He didn't know how far he had run—miles, maybe—and he knew that he couldn't fool himself much longer. He was at the end of his strength, and the hounds were closer now. He could hear them. For the last few minutes he'd just been running flat-out, too stupefied with fatigue to turn and dodge and confuse the trail. This was open country, anyway. Backtrac
king wouldn't do any good. The hounds could see him, and unlike other hunted animals, he had no convenient burrow to hide in.

  He risked a look back, and to his horror, he saw that the hounds were not alone. He could see the torches of the Hunt, the glow of the riders' bodies. Against all hope, this time the rade hadn't lost interest in the chase, had followed the pack closely.

  Of course. Aerune would want to be in at this last kill. He might even deny the hounds their pleasure, saving Elkanah for some new torment.

  Behind him, he heard the horn blow victory, the prey in sight. From a view, to a kill.

  At that thought, Elkanah's last shred of control snapped. He could not—would not—die as Liverakos had. He ran, heedless of the stones that cut his feet, up the sloping ground toward the ridge.

  There was a path cut into the hillside, leading up to the top of the ridge. Earlier he would have avoided it as a matter of course. Now it seemed to provide some haven, and he followed it unthinkingly. Twice he fell to his knees as his strength failed him, and twice he forced himself to stagger onward as the pack howled eagerly behind him. He could hear the riders now, shouting and laughing as they closed in, their horses scrabbling and slipping as they were forced up the steep narrow track. He grabbed one of the loose rocks as he ran. It was a poor weapon, but all he had. He would not give up without a fight.

  The trail flattened out as he reached the top of the ridge. The wind was colder here, blowing steadily. He looked around, trying to see where the trail led now. There was a cave ahead. No—he paused to claw the sweat from his eyes—not a cave, just two rocks, leaning against each other to form the shape of a crude doorway. He should have been able to see through the opening to what lay beyond, but all he could see was blackness, blackness that shimmered and twisted like an oil slick on water. A Gate—he'd learned about them in his captivity. But to where?