Darklands (29 page)

“They went back to their physical bodies. In Boston, they were dead for three days, and then they woke up as zombies. None that I talked to remembered anything about being here. They said coming back was like waking up from a dreamless sleep.”

“Well, does that surprise you? You were in the Black. If you’d simply woken up again in your physical body after that, what would you remember?”

“Good point.”

Dad rubbed his beard. “The world
has
changed. What about Mab? Surely I can rely on her to stay the same.”

I laughed. “You know Mab. If anything, she gets younger.” I didn’t want to think about what Mab would say if she knew where I was right now.

“Speaking of your illustrious aunt, if she could see us, she’d be scolding me because you’ve been here all of half an hour and I haven’t yet given you a weapon. What do you need?”

“What do you have?”

“Anything you wish. Let’s start with a dagger. Sit back, and be amazed.”

Dad rubbed his hands together. He spread them apart a little way, and a glowing ball appeared between them. Again he rubbed his hands together and spread them apart, wider this time. The ball grew. When it was a little bigger than a golf ball,
he began to shape it, almost like he was working with clay. He pulled it, stretching it out like taffy, into a bar maybe a foot long. He spun the bar, smoothing one end with his hands into a grip. Then he flattened out the rest of the bar into a blade, pinching the edges and running his fingers from one end to the other. A glowing object the size and shape of a dagger hovered in the air.

“Hocus pocus!” Dad said, and snapped his fingers. The dagger clattered onto the floor. At the same time, Dad plopped down heavily on the bed. He bent forward, breathing hard, like a runner who’d just crossed a marathon finish line.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded. “Leaves me a bit winded,” he said. “Go on, take a look.”

I picked up the dagger. It was solid, warm to the touch, made of metal with a leather grip.

“How did you do that?”

“Magic.” He looked up and grinned, reminding me of the time I was five and he pulled a quarter from behind my ear. “I admit the ‘hocus-pocus’ part was for show.”

“I’ve never seen magic do anything like that.”

“Not bad, huh? Although you should see what the royal wizards can do.”

“Where does the Darklands magic come from?”

“Some say it comes from Lord Arawn. Some say it flows like water under the land, bubbling up in wondrous springs of pure magic—although no one’s ever actually seen a spring like that. Truth is, no one knows. It’s like asking where air comes from in the Ordinary.”

I tested the dagger’s blade; it was as sharp as any in my weapons cupboard at home. A thought struck me, and I smiled. “Hey, can you make me a magic arrow while you’re at it? I’ll need one to get out of here.”

“What do you mean?” The grin vanished from my father’s face. I’d been joking, but his dead-serious expression made me nervous. “Vic, how did you enter the Darklands?”

“Mallt-y-Nos. I shifted into one of her hellhounds, and she drove me across the border.”

Dad stared at me, his mouth open.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I lied. It was the worst shift I’d ever experienced. So much pain. The memory made me cringe. “It got me in.”

“But to get out,” Dad spoke slowly, like he was reluctant to ask, “what did you promise her?”

“I’ve got to pick up a few things for her while I’m here. I figure the Darklands must have a Walmart, right? They’re everywhere now.”

No hint of a smile. “What things?”

“Well, a magic arrow, like I said. The one she wants belongs to someone named…” I searched my memory for the name. “Someone named Rudy? No, that’s not right. Rhudda.”

“Rhudda Gawr. The Red Giant. He owns an arrow that never misses its target. It’s his second most prized possession.”

“What’s the first?” At least the Night Hag wasn’t expecting me to sneak off with that, whatever it was.

Dad ignored my question. “What else does she want?”

“A white falcon. Have you heard of a place called Hellsmoor?”

Dad stood, pounding a fist into his hand. “
Damn
that hag! She might as well have demanded that you pluck a hair from the beard of Lord Arawn himself—and steal his hunting horn while you’re at it.” I bit my lip. “Oh, no. She didn’t. Vic, you didn’t agree to—”

“Let’s put it this way: Lord Arawn’s beard is safe from me.”

Dad sank back down on the bed. His shoulders slumped. He looked tired. And old—older than I remembered my grandfather. He put his head in his hands.

“What is it, Dad?” He didn’t answer. I thought again of how we’d snuck through the woods to get here. “Is there some reason you’re keeping a low profile? Because you can stay here and be safe. Just point me toward Tywyll and—”

“No.” His head snapped up, eyes fierce. “I’m going with you.” He looked around the room. “I’ve shut myself away with my books for too long. I have to tell you, Vic, you’re trying to do the impossible. But as long as I’m around, I swear you won’t be trying alone.”

DAD MADE ME ANOTHER WEAPON OUT OF MAGIC, A SHORT sword. But doing so seemed to take a lot out of him. As before, he had to sit down after the weapon assumed its final shape. This time, he leaned back against the wall and fell asleep for a few minutes. I studied him. He seemed thinner than when I’d first seen him, his cheeks sunken. When he awoke with a snort and leapt to his feet, I was sure he was half an inch shorter.

“What’s next?” he asked, rubbing his hands together. “How about a battle ax?”

“Dad, when you work magic like that, what does it do to you?”

“Oh, it takes a bit out of me. But I’ll be fine.” He started to draw his hands apart, a glow already forming between them. I reached out and pressed his hands back together.

“No. No battle ax.”

“Vic—”

“I mean it. If you’re coming with me, I need you at one hundred percent.”

Dad protested, but when he nodded and dropped his hands he looked relieved.

“Besides,” I said, “too many weapons weigh a person down. I prefer to travel light.” That wasn’t exactly what you’d call true.
When I was in unfamiliar, potentially hostile territory, I preferred to travel armed to the teeth. The more blades, the better. But Dad accepted my words.

He armed himself, too, but he didn’t need magic to do it. He strapped on weapons he already owned: a dagger, a sword, and a small hatchet. I watched him buckle on his baldric. Yes, he was definitely shorter. Whatever happened, I would not let him work magic around me again.

Within minutes we were ready to go. Dad tossed the knapsack outside the cave and crawled out after it. By the time I’d followed him, he’d put the knapsack on.

“I can carry that,” I said.

He looked offended. “Hey, I might be your old man, but I’m not
an
old man. There’s a difference, you know.” He turned and set off down the slope.

OUR TRIP THROUGH THE WOODS WAS VERY DIFFERENT FROM the previous one. Instead of keeping low and speaking in whispers, Dad stomped along, branches snapping under his feet, whistling a Welsh folk song.

“What’s that song? You used to sing it when Gwen and I were little.”

“You remember? It’s called ‘Ar Lan y Môr.’” He cleared his throat, and his voice rang out in a rich baritone:
“Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion. Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion. Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne, yn cysgu’r nos a chodi’r bore.
”

“I do remember—‘Beside the Sea,’ right? It’s the one about roses and lilies.”

He chuckled. “You girls always wanted me to sing it in English.” He started again, from the beginning: “Beside the sea grow roses red, beside the sea white lilies spread, beside the sea my true love dreams”—I joined him for the next line—“until she’s touched by morning’s beams.”

My voice cracked on the final note. Well, I’d never wanted to be a singer.

Dad laughed and clapped an arm around my shoulders. “Good times, Vic. We did have some good times.”

We sang the song all the way through. After the third verse, we came to a wide dirt road and turned left on it.

“Dad, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“When you pulled me out of the Black, we were whispering and sneaking through the woods. Now we’re singing at the top of our lungs and acting like we own the place. What changed?”

“I told you, Vic. I’ve given up my hideout. Now that I’m going to Tywyll, I can be as loud as I please.”

“Why?”

Dad smiled. “Why, why, why? You were always brimming over with whys when you were a little girl.” For a moment, his eyes went distant with some memory. “Well, here’s an answer. My presence is requested in Tywyll, and I didn’t wish to go. I wanted to stay in my hideout and read my books. But now we’re on the road to Tywyll, so it’s no longer an issue.”

“Why—?”

“You asked about magic before.” Dad was using his lecturer’s voice. That meant he’d said all he was going to say about why he’d been hiding at the edges of the Darklands. “As you’ve noticed, magic is different here. In your world, people use magic. Here, magic uses us. Let me put it another way, one I touched upon before. In the Ordinary, magic is energy, and people manipulate it to achieve their aims. In the Darklands, magic is substance. Everything you see around you—the trees, this path, the rocks, even people’s bodies—they’re all made of magic. The magic draws on us, on the shades who live here, to animate it.”

“So, the magic…eats you?”

“That isn’t exactly how I’d put it, but I suppose it’s not far off. Most of us don’t stay here long enough to be fully consumed by the magic. After six months or a year—or what passes for that amount of time here—most shades dive into the cauldron of rebirth for another round of life in the Ordinary.”

I was glad my father hadn’t done that yet. It was so good to see him, almost like he’d never been gone. “How long have you been here?” I asked. “In Darklands time, I mean.”

He shrugged and slid his eyes away. “Oh, well, a while. I’m in no hurry to take a dip in a cauldron. I’m not ready to be reborn. The reincarnation process…it wipes your memory clean. Say, for example, that I was reborn as an infant in Florida. And say your mother saw me one day in my baby carriage. She’d stop and coo and fuss over the adorable little baby.” He smiled at the image, but there was sadness, too. “And maybe—just maybe—she’d see some spark of something that made her think for a
moment of me, of
this
me. But I wouldn’t know her at all. My lover, my wife, the mother of my girls. I wouldn’t know her.”

Dad stopped. He took off his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his tunic, turning away from me as he did. His bent head, his hunched shoulders, the pain I’d heard in his voice…A hard fist of remorse squeezed my heart. Everything he’d lost—it was my fault.

I put a hand on his shoulder, but he shook me off. He put his glasses back on and cleared his throat. When we started walking again, he picked up his lecture like there’d been no interruption.

“Magic gets the most out of the newly arrived shades. With time, we become depleted. As magic gets less out of a shade, it becomes harder for that shade to work with magic.”

That sounded suspiciously like what I’d witnessed when Dad shaped magic in his cave.

“Mab said there’s a cauldron of regeneration. Why can’t you— Why can’t a shade go into that cauldron?”

“Some can. It’s not up to us. The magic chooses. I’ve seen what happens. We don’t know its choice until we’re at the cauldrons and it’s too late to turn back.” He gestured to his outfit. “These black clothes? They show my status. According to the magic that rules this place, that
is
this place, my time is up. That’s why I’ve been staying as far from Tywyll as I can get. In the city, it’s hard to resist the cauldrons’ pull.”

The fist squeezed harder, and I stopped in my tracks. “Dad, go back. I’ll do this on my own.”

Dad stopped, too, but he acted like he hadn’t heard me. “A lot of shades lived long, full lives in the Ordinary. They got bored there, got tired of being old. For them, there was nothing left to do in that lifetime. Those shades don’t stay here long; they’re more than ready to start from scratch.” He shook his head. “But not me, Vic. Not me. I don’t feel like I’m done with my life. I don’t want to start all over again.”

I didn’t know what to say. My father had loved his life—his family, his studies—and I’d taken it away from him. All of it. The damn fist in my chest ripped the heart right from my body.

Something—an insect—flew at my head, and I waved it away through the blur of tears.

“Vic…”

“Don’t say anything, Dad. I know it’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

“No, Vic, listen to me.” My father’s voice was low, tense. “There’s a demon on your shoulder.”

Without turning my head, I glanced toward my shoulder. A black butterfly, with sharp, saw-tooth wings and the face of a demon, rested there.

“Is your dagger bronze?” I whispered. The one he’d made for me wasn’t.

“I heard that!” yelled Butterfly. It had a loud voice for such a small incarnation. “If you’re going to plot my death, you might as well do it in front of me.”

Dad stared at Butterfly, mouth open. He shifted his astonished gaze to me and shook his head. “There’s no need to carry bronze weapons here,” he said. “Demons are excluded from the Darklands.”

“That’s why I came out to take a look around, once your precious daughter’s guilt made me strong enough. Something to tell the folks back home in Uffern.” Butterfly rose and flitted around for a minute, then returned to its perch on my shoulder. “Eh. Nothing special. So, Evan”—my father looked startled at the mention of his name—“are you pissed or what at golden girl here for killing you?”

“Shut up, Butterfly,” I hissed.

Dad’s eyes grew rounder. “Vic, is that true? Do you think you caused my death?”

I looked at the ground. Butterfly chortled like a buzzsaw in my ear. The damn demon was enjoying this.

My father smacked Butterfly off my shoulder. Then he took my hand. “I’ve never blamed you, Vic. Never. It wasn’t you; it was the Destroyer.”

“Yeah, yeah. A technicality.” Butterfly hovered in the air, out of range. “Who summoned the Destroyer? Who nearly got her ass roasted and had to be rescued?”